The $300K buy-in 2017 Aria Super Roller Bowl in Las Vegas is nearing its conclusion, only 3 players are left in the field – the American Jake Schindler is in the chip lead, battling the two remaining Germans Christoph Vogelsng and Stefan Schillhabel for the $6 million first prize. Many big names perished by now, including Daniel Negreanu and Fedor Holz; and one of the big guns, Doug "WCGRider" Polk lost a large junk of his stack which led to his elimination in a peculiar way which generated some discussion online later.
Polk has amassed an internet following of large size so understandably anything he does that is slightly out of the ordinary gets a fairly good amount of attention. He got the worse of it this time, as many people feel he played a hand poorly in the Aria Super High Roller that ended up costing 68 BBs for him.
The hand started with Bill Klein opening pre-flop to 14,000, a little over two big blinds, then both blinds, Leon Tsoukernik in the small and Doug Polk in the big both flatting.
The flop came 975, all clubs and Tsoukernik decided to lead small, 15,000 that Polk elected to re-raise to 50,000 with his flush and gutshot straight draw (the first unusual move by him), then Klein folded and when it got back to Tsoukernik, he called. The river, Qs, improved Polk to top pair yet he still wasn’t very happy to face a pot-size bet from his opponent but he still called to see a complete brick river, an off-suite deuce. This time Tsoukernik put out a half-pot bet, 200,000 chips that, once again, Polk called. At the showdown Tsoukernik showed pocket aces, evidently beating Polk’s top pair-bad kicker.
Doug Polk dedicated most of his High Roller blog breaking down the hand, where he said that he believes his turn call was harder to justify than his river call even though it cost him fewer chips since on the river he had some worse hands in his range, like the busted nut flush draw that he could have folded and because his opponent played the hand in such an unusual way that he couldn’t tell what he was representing.
You can watch Polk’s entire commentary below, starting at the 7:40 mark:
Even though this hand ultimately cost Polk his tournament, he later went on to post about it light-heartedly on his Facebook. He does not have much time to dwell on the issue anyway because – as he’s saying in the post – he’s about play on another episode of Poker Night in America and he’s also involved in a WSOP tag-team tournament.
This wasn’t all the coverage Polk’s Aria SHRB hand got, however. On Polk’s poker coaching site, Upswing Poker’s YouTube channel Ryan Fee also decided to break down the action. Fee also criticized Tsoukernik for the way he played his pocket Aces – especially flatting the best possible hand pre-flop. You can watch that video too here:
What is strange that in Doug Polk’s analysis the "villain" does have the nut flush draw Ace of clubs as one of his hole card while when Ryan Fee covers the same hand, he does not.
