Poker's Greatest Prop Bets

Self confessed prop bet fan Barry Carter shares some of his favourite stories of crazy proposition bets between poker players.

ElkY (After losing a prop bet)

Poker is a very serious place at the moment, so my hat goes off to jokers like Bertrand 'ElkY' Grospellier and Eugene Katchalov, who made it a little more entertaining with a series of WCOOP prop bets.

As a result of a number of bets, ElkY has to learn Ukranian; Katchalov has to do 1,000 push ups in 12 hours; furthermore both men are cycling 170km from Cannes to San Remo.

Prop bets have always been a part of poker that has fascinated me and the ones poker players get up to often seem downright insane. As cool as poker can seem, there is nothing like a good prop bet to shine a light on how funny the game can be, and demonstrate the weird disconnect poker players have from the rest of society.

Why do poker pros prop bet?

When a poker player thinks he is right about something, they bet. They bet if they think they have the best hand and they bet if they think they can get the other man to fold. Prop bets might seem a degenerate form of gambling, but often they are just an extension of someone putting money on their perceived edge.

Most people would not risk large sums of money proving something they believe to be true, but a poker player does it as a day job, so it makes sense they are unlikely to back down when faced with a prop bet.

I have noticed that there is a distinct difference between what most of the old school and new school poker players will bet on. The old school poker pros tend to bet on something when they have a perceived edge, whereas a lot of modern prop bets are based on something the participants want to happen - for example a sporting challenge, a poker volume bet or a weight loss bet.

These are all things that the player wants to happen anyway, but they don't have the natural motivation to do it without money on the line. Whatever the motivation for a prop bet, they tend to be very entertaining.

Dietary bets

Ted Forrest after losing 48lbs

Food often plays a big part in proposition betting. Vegetarian Howard Lederer (apologies in advance guys, a lot of these stories include people embroiled in poker scandals at the moment) famously ate a hamburger for $10,000 in a bet with David Grey.

Grey had a chance to win his money back by eating one single olive. Grey hated olives so much that he simply paid up.

In 2010, Phil Ivey lost a $1 million prop bet famously made against Tom Dwan on High Stakes Poker. Ivey lasted all of three weeks in his attempt to become vegetarian for a year. He agreed a buyout of $150,000 with Dwan and went on to devour the most expensive steak in poker history.

The most common dietary bet people make is the weight loss bet - everyone seems to make themand I've even done a few myself. There are simply too many weight loss bets to mention in poker, going all the way back to the stories of Doyle Brunson.

The most extreme of all of these had to be between Mike Matusow and Ted Forrest. Matusow lost 62lbs in a year to win $100,000. Fast forward a couple of years to 2010 and Forrest took on the challenge himself, betting that he could get down from 188lbs to 140lbs in just over three months.

Forrest is the king of weight loss bets and took a total of $2 million from Mike (who is still reportedly paying it off to this day). The weight loss was so extreme that Mike was convinced Ted might die at the end of it.

Sporting props

Lex vs ElkY

Many poker players are as confident with their sporting prowess as they are with their cards, and this is where some of the most entertaining stories have come from.

Erick Lindgren got a lot of headlines with a golfing prop bet where he had to shoot under 100 with no caddy on one of the hottest days of the year in Las Vegas (with a hangover no less) during the WSOP.

He managed it, took down over $340k and said after the bet he has never quite felt the same physically since.

One of the true legends of sporting prop bets is Huck Seed, who was a talented track athlete prior to poker. Some of his stories include running marathons with no prior training, doing standing back flips and attempting to run a 4:39 minute mile.

More recently, Ashton Griffin propelled himself to the ranks of the prop bet kings by running 70 miles in one day. He won nearly $1 million for this bet which took place on the treadmill of his gym and it took him 23 hours to complete.

Some of the most infamous sporting bets have involved poker players stepping into the ring. Gus Hansen lost an awful boxing match to his friend Theo Jorgensen a few years ago.

The best poker punch up had to be last year's kick boxing match between Lex Veldhuis and ElkY, where the Frenchman took some massive kicks to the head for our amusement:

Amarillo Slim

My favourite sporting story involves Amarillo Slim and table tennis. Slim had already become infamous when he beat former tennis pro Bobby Riggs in a game of table tennis where Slim got to pick what was used as a paddle - a frying pan. Slim had practiced for months to perfect his frying pan technique.

Many years later he found he was getting regular offers to repeat the bet. He waited until the money was too big to turn down and accepted a bet to play against a Taiwanese table tennis champion.

Once again, his got to stipulate what would be used as a paddle, but instead of revealing two frying pans, he brought out two glass Coca-Cola bottles:

"The thin end is the paddle." Slim won in straight sets.

Poker propositions

Phil Ivey winning bracelet bets

It stands to reason that poker players will bet on their ability to play poker. Online this often comes in the form of volume bets; such as playing X amount of hands in a month or getting to SuperNova Elite in a short period.

Then of course you have popular poker variations like last longer bets, profit bets, and cross booking bets.

But perhaps the most notable poker prop bet, at least for TV poker fans, has been the bracelet bet.

The high stakes "TV pros" had become somewhat disinterested in the smaller buy-in WSOP events until they started betting on whether they could win a bracelet with their peers.

Most of the well known poker pros have ongoing bracelet bets, which has meant that the WSOP means as much to all of them as it does to Phil Hellmuth. Phil Ivey has a number of ongoing bracelet bets which have seen him reignite the WSOP and in 2010 Tom Dwan almost broke Las Vegas when he got heads-up for his first bracelet. Simon Watt defeated him for that title and denied him what would have been his "biggest winning day ever."

Plain stupid prop bets

Jay Kwik's bathroom bet

Some people are so desperate to make money that they will go to extreme lengths to make a prop bet. One unknown player managed to get Tom Dwan to pay him $5,000 to jump into a shark tank, which he did (That same player lost it all in a single hand as soon as he took it to the tables).

Then there is poker player Jay Kwik who won a month long prop bet with Andrew Robl that he could stay in the bathroom of a Bellagio hotel room for a whole month without any contact with the outside world. He took to the bet like a duck to water, and eventually Andrew Robl bought out of the bet early for $40,000.

One bet most players would find surprisingly easy seemed impossible for John Henigan, who lost a $50,000 bet that he couldn't stay in Des Moines, Iowa for a month with no gambling. Hennigan lasted just two days before he bought out of the bet and was back in Vegas.

One of my favourite stories of the old days involves Johnny Moss who was offered 15/1 odds that he couldn't knock out a huge brute who had never lost a bar fight in his life. Moss started by sucker punching him in the back of the head. The punch did not work and Moss ended up in hospital with broken bones.

"15/1 was too good to pass up" he explained later.

Discuss your favourite prop bet stories

By Barry Carter