Just a Clever Ruse?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

$585,000 Pot Just a Clever Ruse?

Last night Jay "pr1nnyraid" Rosenkrantz, or Krantz as he is known to the poker world, won a $585,000 pot on Full Tilt Poker from a relative unknown with the moniker TonyBliar.

The $585,000 became the new record for the biggest pot ever played online. Previously, that honor had belonged to a $465,451 pot played between Fast_Freddie and bad_ip on the Ladbrokes network in June 2006.

The pot, which you can view in its entirety here, starts out with TonyBliar raising from the button/small blind to $3,000. Krantz re-raises to $11,000 and TonyBliar smooth-calls.

The flop comes 9 9 3 and Krantz bets $19,000. TonyBliar makes the call.

The turn drops the 5; Krantz bets $53,000 and TonyBliar calls once again. The river trips the board with the 9 and Krantz bets $61,000.

TonyBliar now check-raises to $122,000, and Krantz raises to $209,504 and is all-in. TonyBliar calls his last $87,504. Krantz shows 7 7 for the full house, nines full of sevens, and TonyBliar turns over 3 5, a smaller full house.

Krantz's bigger full house is good for the $585,008 pot and biggest-pot-of-all-time honors.

If you found the action in this hand a little confusing, you're not alone. TonyBliar's call of the three-bet pre-flop with 3 5, though highly questionable, is probably the least confusing of all the plays in this hand.

The river reraise by Krantz would just never happen if this were a real hand. With stacks so large Krantz would never reraise that river bet.

There would be no value in a third raise on the river since a worse hand would never pay it off. He would instead be happy to smooth-call the min-raise and see a showdown.

Strange plays alone, however, are not what have so many high-stakes pros questioning the validity of this hand.

Earlier in the night Krantz played a session against Ariel "DaEvils" Schneller, also known as FoxwoodsFiend. To call this session strange is an understatement.

Krantz and FoxwoodsFiend are known to be very good friends. Would they do battle in the high-stakes arena just for s**ts and giggles? I mean after all, who doesn't enjoy taking a house off one of their closest friends?

The session that they played more closely resembled a drunken game of 5¢/10¢ with friends than the $300/$600 No-Limit game it actually was.

The play in this game was often head-scratching - see here and here.

Does the Professor know about this?

When the dust eventually settled, Krantz found himself $370k-ish poorer.

Now let's go back to TonyBliar. TonyBliar is by no means a nosebleed player. A regular grinder on Full Tilt, he has not dabbled much in the nosebleed games. He is, however, a friend of FoxwoodsFiend.

The consensus among poker pundits and railbirds is that FoxwoodsFiend transferred the money into his friend's account so that his friend could play a similarly strange session versus Krantz at "Rail Heaven," the new $500/$1,000 table at Full Tilt, and dump it back to him.

That way Krantz could garner the biggest-pot-of-all-time honors and TonyBliar could earn biggest-fish-of-all-time status, thereby giving him all the action he could ever want.

Does this mean that this is a case of chip-dumping? No, not really, since nobody was adversely affected.

Is it then a case of the three of them playing a cruel joke on the rail and the poker forum world? Well, maybe. There are just too many coincidences and questions to believe that this is a legitimate pot.

Just like that we have to add an asterisk to the biggest-pot-of-all-time designation. Hopefully it doesn't piss Krantz off as much as it pissed Barry Bonds off.

To see more hand histories from their session, or more of the Top 100 biggest pots online over the last day, week, month and year, jump to the PokerListings.com MarketPulse section.

More online poker blogs from Dan Skolovy:

• Strategy Snapshot: I Know That You Know
• Strategy Snapshot: Image is Everything
• Strategy Snapshot: No Way in a Million Years
• Strategy Snapshot: The World Is Not Enough