POTD #80 FT Friday: British Poker Open £50k Bubble

Hammering chips in the pot near West Ham's pitch

The Hockey Hall of Fame recently announced the class of inductees for 2025. For those who do not know, the HHOF has three distinct categories of people inducted: male players, female players, and builders. I think the Poker Hall of Fame should consider doing something similar; there is already a massive log jam of players. Phil Galfond, Scott Seiver, and (POTD Subscriber) Nick Schulman are all deserving inductees, but only one can be inducted, and as the original generation of online players ages into their 40s, the queue to get in will only get more crowded. One way to make the queue a little less crowded would be to follow the model of the NHL-- classify players and builders in separate categories and allow individuals in each category to get inducted every year. That way, someone like Isai Schienberg, the founder of PokerStars, or Paul Phua, one of the founders of Triton Poker, or tournament directors and other individuals who built the game of poker can be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

An individual who absolutely deserves to get in as a builder is, recent first time bracelet winner, Cary Katz. He created PokerGo and the PokerGo Studio. The Aria High Rollers are responsible for changes that have trickled down into all poker tournaments, like the BB ante, the increased use of time banks, and rake rebates for on-time registrants. Paul Campbell, Cary, and their team run some of the best tournaments in the business, but since I mostly do not play poker tournaments in the USA, I’ve rarely played them. So in 2019 when Cary and PokerGo announced they would be running a British Poker Open series, which would conclude with a £250k Super High Roller Bowl, I was very excited to go London and play some high-stakes poker. For a variety of reasons, many of them regulatory, the series was a bust. Very few VIPs showed up, and the fields were all small. The series was hosted in East London, which is not as convenient for VIPs to get to as Park Lane, where the EPTs and Tritons were hosted. Even Hall of Famers have valleys in their career. However, the hotel was nice, and the casino was in the middle of a mall with a decent food court, which was convenient. It allowed me to buy a monitor at an electronics store when I decided on some days playing online was the smarter move because the live tournaments had so little value.

I started off the series pretty well; I won the £10k Short Deck and cashed the £10k NLHE. I was hoping to keep my momentum going in the higher-stakes tournaments, which had small, tough fields, a small amount of players cashing, and very big bubbles. In POTD #78, I wrote about a hand where Ben Tollerene had a premium hand preflop, and in a big stack vs. big stack pot, decided the best course of action was to go all-in. In today’s hand, I am a short stack with a premium hand preflop, and I made the same decision Ben made. “I’m all-in. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it.” At the time, I was not using PIO ICM as much in my studying. Almost 6 years later, with the help of some more advanced tools, I will answer the question: Did I punt?

British Poker Open Event 9 £50k NLHE

10k/20k/20k (SB/BB/BBA) 4 Players Left. 3 Cash (144k, 270k, 486k)

I (280k) raise A♠️K♠️ in the CO to 40k, Christoph Vogelsang (1.085M) folds on the button, David Peters (565k) folds in the SB, Mikita Badziakouski (730k) calls in the BB.

Flop (110k) 5♥️Q♣️J♣️: Mikita checks, I go all-in for 240k, Mikita calls with 9♣️8♣️, turns a flush and I bubble.

HH: PokerGo hand starts at 22:58