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The Lodge Card Club poker room outside of Austin has led to some monster poker hands in recent weeks. About a month ago, Doug Polk won a $500K+ hand which is the largest cash poker hand won at The Lodge Card Club so far.
A few weeks later, The Lodge has produced another massive hand. This time around a player who goes by ‘Goofy’ on the stream got rocked. He loses a $305,100 hand after starting with KhKs and hitting a set on the flop when the Kc came out.
Here is the clip of the $305K+ poker hand and I’ve included my surface level analysis below on where things went wrong…
The cash game vs tournament strategy can and will trip up a lot of people watching this clip from the Poker Lodge stream. It’s also worth noting that ‘Goofy’ could have played this hand any number of ways.
With the stakes at $100/$200, Goofy looked down to find KhKS and raised to $1,800 while sitting on a stack of $258,800 in chips. This is a cash game so those chips have a direct monetary value and aren’t like tournament chips where everyone starts with a set amount.
Goofy is playing from the button position, so an $1,800 raise could be seen as a hijack. Another player, Ryan, looked down in the big blind to find 7d7h which is a strong pocket pair to defend blinds and three-bet to $6,000. Then the player going by Taras who was sitting UTG (had already just flat called) four-bet the pot to to $18,000 instead of flat calling.
Goofy meanwhile is still sitting VERY pretty with KK. It’s not an all-in situation because it’s a cash game, he could theoretically extract more cash from the pot, and he isn’t sitting on AA or A-K so he could be beaten already and he knows that but that’s poker, baby.
Ryan calls with 77, Goofy opts to call with KK, and then the flop comes out: Kc2c4h with $55,100 already in the pot.
At this point, if Goofy was worried about AA or AK then he’s licking his chops because he just hit a set of kings on the flop. It is hard to imagine that anyone at the table would have put Taras on an ace + low suited connector after the large 4-bet in pre-flop action but as you well know by now he’s sitting on 4 of 5 clubs to a flush.
Ryan checks his 7-7 and Taras with four clubs and fires off a $20,000 bet. Goofy is staring at the board trying to figure out how he can extract as much money as possible, assuming Taras is bluffing into him or at the very least as AA, AK, QQ, or a lower set than kings. So, he raises the $20K bet up to $50K and Taras calls.
The turn comes out as the 6 of diamonds and here is where Goofy shoots himself in the foot. Instead of keeping his foot on the gas and forcing Taras to make a decision for a lot of chips, he just checks after Taras checked and gives his opponent a free card.
Then the 8 of clubs comes out on the river and his set of kings is dead. There’s already $155,100 in the pot but he thinks he’s MONEY with three of a kind.
It’s a brutal way to lose $150K+ in a single hand of poker at The Lodge but from the outside looking in, it sure seems like if he’d applied more pressure on the turn and not allowed a free card to come out then he would have either won the pot or he would have lost close to the same amount because he would have recognized that his opponent was still very much in the hand and he could have played the river quite differently.
Ultimately, this analysis is coming from yours truly and my poker results pale in comparison to these guys and I’m sitting here watching a clip with the benefit of hindsight. It’s easy to say what could/should have been done differently with the benefit of hindsight and seeing both of their hole cards.
If you read all of that then you are clearly into poker so here’s another recent hand from The Lodge poker room outside of Austin where Nik Airball wins $421K:
That has to be just a drop of water in a barrel of his losses over the past year, right?