Doyle Brunson is no stranger to the world of high stakes poker, but has always tended to venture away from the extreme pots running into the high 3 figure regions. This all changed when Brunson ran into a regular of the High Stakes Poker table named Guy Laliberté and sparks flew to say the least. Laliberté has been very active at the High Stakes Poker recently, developing himself an image and attracting much attention from the audience with his no fear approach to poker. The High Stakes Poker table is no place for the faint hearted, especially since the already large buy in was raise to an astounding $500,000 a few weeks back, meaning that only the high-rollers will be involved in pots.
This particular hand consisted of Brunson holding Ad-Td with which he made a pre-flop raise of $11,200 to be called by four players including Laliberté who was holding Ah 5h. Next came the flop which was made up of Ac-Js-4d, Brunson raised $40,000 with the whole table folding except for Laliberté. The poker legend continued his aggression by raising again by $110,000 after the turn which showed a 2d, to which Laliberté reacted by re-raising the pot to a shocking $310,000 with his ace rag. Doyle called and the river was shown twice after both players agreed, but neither card helped Laliberté, leaving Doyle Brunson to take down a total pot of $818,100. Many of the players at the table, along with commentators made the fair assumption that Laliberté was holding a hand of a much better quality than he did, and thought that Doyle might be in a spot of trouble with his top pair ten kicker.
One of the other players that was sat at the table was Jamie Gold, who obviously also guessed that Brunson was about to fall victim to a huge loss, as he made the comment “he still has outs”, referring to Brunson’s potential to hit his flush draw on the river, of course Brunson was a high favourite at this point with a 75% chance of winning the pot.
This pot was the officially the largest valued pot in High Stakes Poker history, many would think that the plays seen in this particular hand were extremely wild especially considering the extent of the buy in, but as the saying goes ‘that’s poker’. The record stood for only a few minutes thought until amazingly Sammy Farha got involved in a pot with Patrik Antonius that resulted with Farha losing approximately an unbelievable $1 million in a single pot. The High Stakes Poker table is a perfect example of how truly exciting and invigorating the game of no limit Texas Hold’em really can be.
