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Home / Uncategorized / Monster Pot Mondays, and Greenstein’s billions

It was back to record setting ways this week, and it was ‘Kleppr’ again that was raking the biggest pots. In a single session on November 3, the American player won six hands worth in excess of 2B chips – including a new record hand of 3.68B. He now holds the top four spots in the all time list.

We’ll get to all that in just a second, but first we want to go back to that day Team Pro Barry Greenstein decided to play the Sunday Billion…and won it. We wanted to know both why he decided to play it and what winning it meant. So we asked him.

“It’s good that I can represent PokerStars by playing in the Sunday Billion. Once we get real money games back in the US, obviously I’ll be playing in the Sunday Million instead,” he said. “People continually thank me for playing with them when I play in play money games. They are serious recreational players and wouldn’t ever have a chance to play with a professional player if some of us didn’t take some time to play in events like these.”

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Barry Greenstein playing live in the Isle of Man last year

Greenstein told he still finds enough of a challenge in the big play money games.

“It’s always fun to win when you’ve conditioned yourself to be a successful poker player,” he said. “Of course I realize it’s not real money but you can sometimes just view online play, whether for cash or for fun, as playing to get bigger numbers on the screen than your opponents, which is kind of like playing a video game.”

Now, on to what happened this week.

The mega hand took place in an extraordinary three-way encounter at the nosebleed 5M/10M stakes. Some heavy pre-flop raising eventually shook out ‘gragon.king’ but ‘ron ooster’ was happy to see a flop for 160M. It cost a further 330M to continue on a board of 7h Td 7d. A third seven hit the turn and the players got all their chips in with a bet and a shove. The river brought a 6.

The players turned over their hands to reveal an incredible high-card clash between AQ and AK, with the higher kicker playing and securing the whole pot for ‘Kleppr’. The hand that folded pre-flop? A6.

Just 20 minutes prior the same combination of players had come agonisingly close to beating the existing biggest pot record (3.6B set on October 25) with a hand that weighed in at 3.56B chips. On that occasion though, the board had been much more generous with ‘Kleppr’ prevailing against ‘ron ooster’ with a flopped ace high flush against a flopped two pair.

The only other player to register a 2B pot this week was Italian ‘philmzycal’. It was the third such time of breaching the landmark figure for a true Monster Pot. The same player managed to top the list of Omaha hands for the week, claiming a 1.1B chip pot at showdown against ‘Divus’ and ‘LuckDr’ in the 1M/2M game.

At the 2.5M/5M level there was the usual mix of short-handed action. The biggest pot of 1.66B was produced on Tuesday by Norwegian ‘rosco2000239’ when his overpair held up against pocket 5s on a low, raggy board.

Not far behind was Chinese player ‘Tiger Chong’ who made quads against the full house of ‘domenico-i15’ in a particularly feisty 6-Max game. That 1.61B chip pot just made it into the overall top 10 for the week.

The biggest pot measured in blinds was generated at the 500K/1M level where ‘3rdWind’ took down 692 BBs with bottom two pair against the flopped top pair of ‘Tirto W’. For most the hand would have probably played out without escalating to such stratospheric levels – but raises were found on every street to produce a huge hand.

After six weeks of the Monster Pot Monday Report, there are the top ten hands:

03/11/2014 3,681,980,000 Kleppr
25/10/2014 3,601,840,000 Kleppr
03/11/2014 3,563,120,000 Kleppr
22/10/2014 3,528,500,000 Kleppr
03/10/2014 3,243,200,000 bachkot 143
05/10/2014 2,865,600,000 Kleppr
02/11/2014 2,759,060,000 LucKeeBalls & Cloud_Hsieh
04/10/2014 2,668,980,000 viktorinhooo
02/11/2014 2,530,340,000 LucKeeBalls
02/11/2014 2,491,740,000 Kleppr

This week’s biggest pots broken down by stakes were as follows:

5M/10M Stakes:
3,681,980,000 Kleppr
3,563,120,000 Kleppr
2,381,000,000 Kleppr
2,313,000,000 Kleppr
2,141,000,000 Kleppr
2,080,000,000 philmzycal
2,020,000,000 Kleppr
1,725,980,000 Kleppr
1,600,000,000 viziato1991
1,450,000,000 philmzycal

2.5M/5M Stakes:
1,662,520,000 rosco2000239
1,619,700,000 Tiger Chong
1,610,600,000 philmzycal & the_vampi506
1,476,340,000 philmzycal
1,426,860,000 rosco2000239
1,309,620,000 philmzycal
1,271,880,000 gragon.king
1,213,000,000 philmzycal
1,179,640,000 Tiger Chong
1,178,600,000 LucKeeBalls

1M/2M Stakes:
1,117,300,000 philmzycal
936,960,000 FAMU-Shark
892,680,000 canarinoross & Evxn
875,680,000 Dash_Lane
830,400,000 rosco2000239
826,140,000 Bunky6387
800,460,000 Modeloisgood & Fastball2014
785,320,000 Divus
767,440,000 Modeloisgood
761,120,000 Evxn

500K/1M Stakes:
691,896,000 3rdWind
591,078,000 SchmoopsDad
575,092,000 canarinoross
547,480,000 xMEDIUMx
542,282,000 Wazzee_nn
530,968,000 orfikos
526,830,000 ron ooster
471,690,000 Krug_Me_Up
461,504,000 69-HABIBI-69
452,944,000 tompharmd

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