High Stakes Poker

A series of high stake poker games took place last November in Macau involving a number of extremely wealthy businessmen and some of the world’s top poker players.

Last November there were rumours on the poker forum 2+2 that Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan and Phil Ivey were taking part in large high-stakes games in Macau playing against very wealthy business men. However, there was very little information released about these games until last week when one of the players came forward with some more information.

Sam Trickett, the Titan Poker sponsored professional has said that he was invited by his friend Tom Dwan to join the games. So he flew to Macau to try his luck against the businessmen, he also said that James Bord (winner of the WSOP Europe Main Event 2010) contributed 30% of his bankroll.

Trickett decided to start out in the low stake games before moving on to the really big games. The lower stakes began at 300/600 HKD (Hong Kong Dollar) which is roughly equal to $40/$80. After making a 2 million HKD profit in these games he decided to move on to the higher stake games.

He joined the biggest games available and sat at a 5,000/10,000 HKD table with Tom Dwan, Di “Urindanger” Dang and the wealthy businessmen. Trickett said that he had to ride his luck in the game and managed to bluff his way to success, otherwise he said that he would have been going home having made a huge loss both for him and James Bord.

At the end of the game he had lost 3 million HKD to Dwan and was all in for 2 million HKD, had he been called he would have been out of money. Trickett was holding Queen and Jack of Hearts with the table showing T-3-2-7-7 meaning that he had nothing. However, he was fairly certain that his opponent also had nothing so made the risk of moving all in. Fortunately for him he had read his opponent correctly and the Chinese businessman folded.

Trickett had a great year last year, he won £1 million in the high-stakes cash games in Macau, and also he won a total of $1,071,356 in live poker tournaments. Half of his winnings came from finishing second place in a $5,000 buy-in NLHE WSOP event and $200,000 was from winning thePartyPoker.com World Open VI. Recently it was announced that he has been nominated in the Player of the Year category in the European Poker Awards which are taking place in Paris on February 13th.