Awesome / High Stakes Poker

Season One

• GSN is putting together the world's first televised high stakes cash game, and Daniel Negreanu wants to use the opportunity to both make some money and make the televised cut as often as possible. Everyone else buys in for a hundred thousand dollars, maybe a bit more. Doyle Brunson goes for half a million. So Daniel puts together a stack of one million dollars, utilizing it from the very start to bully the table and make life hard for everyone else.
  • On two occasions, Daniel raised all-in during the first session, tossing in giant bricks of cash while declaring "I raise a million". Yes, functionally, Daniel could only raise the amount of money his opponent had at the time, so the actual raise was significantly less than a million...but still awesome.
  • After a couple episodes, stopped being quite so awesome, as Daniel began to lose a succession of large pots and eventually lost more than half of his million.

• A set-over-set situation (Amir Nasseri flopping a set of fives and Ted Forrest flopping a set of twos) creates the show's first truly monster pot that gets to showdown. Over two hundred thousand in actual U.S. dollars gets into the center of the table, something the audience had almost certainly never seen before in their lives.

• The final hand of the season saw the classic Holdem nightmare play out between Barry Greenstein with pocket aces and Sammy Farha with pocket kings. The two got into a raising war before the flop, and when Greenstein pushed all-in, Farha took several minutes to consider his options. Known for making quick calls and easily putting in chips with marginal hands, Sammy was really suspicious of Barry, but ultimately called. All the other players had gotten up to leave, but returned to the table on realizing that a massive pot was brewing. The three hundred and sixty thousand dollar pot was a record for the show's first season, a perfect way to end the season. Farha binked a king on the flop and took the pot, solidifying his status as one of the biggest winners of season one.

Season Two

• Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu re-define what the phrase 'monster pot' really means in episode eleven. Both players flop a set, Daniel with sixes and Gus with fives. To be clear, this leaves Gus with a four percent chance of winning the hand at showdown. That four percent comes in when the last five in the deck comes out on the turn. When the smoke clears, Gus has stacked Daniel in a pot of five hundred and seventy-five thousand seven hundred dollars, pretty comfortably the record for a televised pot that made it to showdown at the time.

Season Three

• Brad Booth's caper against Phil Ivey. Getting the biggest superstar in poker to lay down pocket kings on a seven-high flop while holding four-high and a gutshot is undoubtedly an all-time great play. Booth made it all the more awesome by getting out three giant bricks of cash and placing them into the pot to make the bluff-raise, each brick worth a hundred grand.
  Phil Ivey: I wish you'd put the chips in. That cash just looks so sweet.

Season Four

• Phil Hellmuth, at this time typically regarded as a nit and substandard cash game player, made one of the best bluffs the show ever saw on the very first hand of the season. The seven deuce game was on, Hellmuth found a seven deuce from the big blind, and decided to go for it. Unfortunately, Mike Matusow had kings and seemed poised to call Phil down...but Hellmuth was able to perfectly represent a set of queens with large turn and river bets, getting Mike to throw the kings away. Make it five hundred from all the seven other players at the table. Phil used some metagame implications as well, as he knew that Mike had only brought one hundred thousand dollars with him and would be unwilling to commit a significant amount of it to a hand so early in the session.

Season Five

• Okay, the hand between Barry Greenstein and Tom Dwan that resulted in the nine hundred and twenty thousand dollar pot was actually played out in a completely straightforward fashion. Greenstein has pocket aces, the queen four deuce flop gives him very little to be concerned about in terms of hands he's currently losing to, and he's playing known maniac Tom Dwan. Dwan has top pair, king kicker, and the second nut flush draw, and the only hand that has him in any sort of trouble that Barry can have is pocket queens, which he blocks. Both players pretty much have to just raise and keep raising until all the money's in, Barry not willing to let Dwan run him over and Dwan having as much equity as he could possibly hope for. But even though the plays are completely standard, it's still awesome to see a pot over nine hundred thousand dollars, decided of all things by essentially a coinflip.

Season Six

• The bluff. Probably the greatest televised poker hand of all-time, Tom Dwan decides to play his nine eight suited like it's aces or kings, and refuses to abandon that story no matter how much Phil Ivey insists on sticking around. Dwan raises into four players who had called an initial raise preflop, clearing everyone but Ivey out, then bets flop, turn, and river despite never having any sort of made hand or decent draw when Ivey keeps calling. It takes an incredible amount of courage to do this, and could easily go down as one of the all-time great poker blunders had Ivey called on the end, but Dwan wasn't to be deterred by fears of what could go wrong.
  • Phil Ivey has to be credited heavily in this hand as well, taking at least three minutes to think on the river after Dwan has made the final bet, despite holding only a pair of sixes and Dwan having represented an absolutely monster hand the entire way. Ivey clearly suspects something, and his suspicion is correct, but he ultimately can't quite bring himself to do it. Credit for considering it, though.

Season Seven

• Bill Klein is an elderly billionaire and amateur poker player. You expect him to show up to have fun, generally play simple and straightforward poker, and mostly just donate money to the sharks at the table. You certainly don't expect him to decide to try to outplay Phil Galfond, an all-time great poker mind, in a large pot. So, when Galfond held a straight, the board paired on the river, and Klein suddenly leads out one hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a pot of three hundred grand, it's sensible to assume that Klein just made a full house and Galfond can fold, right? And then, the elderly billionaire turns over ten-high, a missed combo draw, which gets the entire table excited. Apologies to Phil, this moment deserves full credit for being awesome.