Draft that! Santhosh Suvarna stings Matt Kalish in record High Stakes Poker pot

The Draft Kings co-founder Matt Kalish lost the biggest pot in High Stakes Poker history last night as Santhosh Suvarna followed up his recent tournament success with a pot worth over $2.4m on the iconic PokerGO show.

The Indian poker star Santhosh Suvarna is on the kind of heater that few in poker ever experience. Just a week on from winning his third WSOP bracelet in Las Vegas, Suvarna took part in a massive pot on High Stakes Poker on PokerGO. Worth over $2.4m, it played out between the Indian pro and Matt Kalish, the owner of popular sportsbetting site DraftKings.

Hot on the heels of his victory worth $1.99 million in the $50,000 High Roller Event #29 at the 2026 World Series of Poker (WSOP), Suvarna’s massive win might have been even larger had the High Stakes Poker regular and Monkey Tilt CEO Señor Tilt a.k.a. Sam Kiki got involved post-flop.

The hand began with Suvarna straddling the action with a bet of $4,000 and he held Q♠Q♣. Kiki bumped that bet to $20,000 with A♠K♢, before DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish called with 8 ♢6 ♢. Suvarna waited for everyone to fold round to him before raising to $100,000. Kiki was in no mood to go away and made the call, and so did Kalish.

The flop of A ♢Q ♢6♡ was never going to slow down the action, with Kiki flopping top pair, Suvarna making a set and Kalish being on a juicy flush draw. Kalish only checked, leading to Suvarna betting $125,000. Kiki called but Kalish asked how much Santhosh Suvarna had to his name before betting all-in for $948,000 before Suvarna asked for a count. He called it off, leaving Kiki to make an agonising fold.

Agreeing to run it twice, Kalish and Suvarna watched the heart-stopping hand play out:

Where does the hand rank in TV poker pots?

Winning both run-outs, Suvarna banked $2.4m in the pot, the largest in High Stakes Poker history, as the Indian’s tablemate Andrew Robl’s was all too happy to remind players on multiple occasions during the action. So where does the hand sit in terms of televised poker pots?

In High Stakes Poker terms, the previous biggest pot was $1.3m, so the new record almost doubled its predecessor. Won by Alan Keating against Peter Wang, the pot saw Keating win the seven-figure stack of cash with kings full of jacks. Keating has a track record of playing in epic pots on live streams, such as the one when he flopped tens full of jacks and took home over $2.1m from two opponents, one of whom was Martin Kabrhel.

These pots were huge but earlier this year, Aaron Tsang lost a pot worth $5 million in an unbelievable hand where he turned the second nut straight only to be beaten by Broadway. Incredibly, though, that pot isn’t even half as big as the record one worth just under $11m that was played out between recent four-time WSOP bracelet winner Alex Foxen and the Finnish pro Ossi ‘Monarch’ Ketola in Jeju, South Korea. Foxen was on the wrong side of an $10.99m cooler in a hand that still makes us wince.