I got an email a little while back from Mori of PokerProductions asking if I’d like to take part in the upcoming season of High Stakes Poker. For those unfamiliar with High Stakes Poker here is the wiki link. I used to play quite a bit of poker from 2005-2007 some would even say I actually played it quite well.

In the last few years I have been preoccupied with other things, so I haven’t much interest in playing poker. Truthfully the high stakes live poker scene kind of peaked in 2007, in 2007 you’d have all kinds of drop ins playing high stakes, guys like Pete the Plumber would show up one weekend gamble pretty high - win some / lose some. Then vanish.

In the summer of 2007 there was a regular 100-200 NL game, along with a few 200-400 blind NL games, these games were regularly filled with people who were willing to (and quite often destined to) lose large sums of money as if it was their job.

By the summer of 2008 the poker scene had cooled off considerably. There was still the odd music producer, former street performer turned cosmonaut as well a few other characters who showed up, played and shoved their money into the center of the table. But for the most part those games ran infrequently, and when they did it was very difficult to get a seat.

So when I heard that High Stakes Poker was filming its 8th season, and by the way Full Tilt Pros like Durrr, Phil Ivey, and Patrik Antonius (arguably the 3 best and toughest poker players to play against in the world) were not allowed to play.  Despite me being extremely rusty at poker, and not really having played stakes like that in some time, I snap accepted.

I flew into Vegas from Burbank the morning the day of the shoot. Usually the way things work is you play poker for around 5 hours, take a dinner break, and then finish up at around 10pm that night. They then take that days worth of taping and turn into X shows depending on how interesting / compelling the play was for that day.

I don’t think that our day of taping was too interesting, for the most part nobody really went off, but the opportunity to make money seemed pretty good.

My table looked like this;

Me

Phil Laak

Mike Baxter (businessman who I have played quite a bit with)

Jonathan Duhamel (WSOP ME winner)

Jason Mercier 

Rando businessman

Rando businessman

Barry Greenstein.

My initial thoughts were that I wanted to play as many pots as possible with the Rando businessmen, and try to play as simple a game as possible. 

The blinds were 400-800 with a 100 ante, meaning it would cost you $2000 to play one round. Most of the people at the table bought in for the minimum $200,000 and I did the same, I was prepared to buy in for another $400,000 if the situation warranted and I went busto.

The last time I had played any remotely moderately staked poker was in 2008, the game then was 500-1000 blind NL (then switched to PLO) and it was easily the wildest / biggest game I had ever played in. I lost a 550,000 pot in the first hour, decided to take a walk around the casino and decide whether I wanted to continue. 

I decided the game was too good to pass up, and continued playing for around 15 more hours. Won the biggest pot of my life, questioned my sanity for playing in a game where most hands were straddled and restraddled sometimes re-re straddled.

For those who are unaware of what this means it means that people would involuntary post 3rd and 4th (sometimes 5th) blinds of $2000, $4000 and $8000 by the time it got to you, it would be 4-8000 to call, sometimes $25,000 to call. Every orbit someone would stick 300-400k in the middle of the table, get called and then say - I don’t have much what do you have? Want to run it twice?

So ya - that was the last time I played live poker and here I was on set getting ready to play a fairly big buyin NL cash game.

The people at High Stakes Poker don’t want you posting any results prior to airing but I’ll will say that I make arguably the worst fold in the history of televised poker (it seemed right when I folded), marginal 1-2 mins later and epically bad 30 mins later.

I had never played a cash game with Barry G before and to be honest hadn’t seen much of his cash game play (I rarely watch the tv shows that I am not on because I am vain like that). So when I made the fold it felt okay, after seeing Barry play for the rest of the day,  I was sure I made a bad fold. I am not sure if this hand appears in episode 1 or 2 but it will surely make the show.

For those interested the show airs on GSN at 5pm PST tonight.