poker

Over the weekend, the biggest high-stakes heads-up cash game in live streamed poker history took place. Patrick Antonius and Ossi Ketola put up $10 million each and played until one man had it all.

The winner was Ketola, better known as Monarch online, who is the owner of the Duel online casino. In a relatively short match on the Triton stream, he won $10 million from Antonius.

Or did he? There is actually a fair amount of scepticism about the legitimacy of this match from many in the poker world, including myself.

Ketola played two high-stakes heads-up matches last week: one with Antonius and one with Wiktor "Limitless" Malinowski. Both are friends of his, and in the case of Malinowski, he travelled to the event with him. In the build up to the match, he was actively looking for opponents, but it appears that he turned down a few interested parties. He left Jeju quite soon after the match

A publicity stunt?

poker

Could this have actually just been a marketing ploy for his website? I'm not for one moment questioning whether the money was put up for the match, and I'm certainly not suggesting that the game itself was not played in the spirit of poker. I have no doubt that from Triton's perspective, this match was exactly what was advertised. It just seems that if you were looking for a publicity stunt in the world of gambling, record-breaking high-stakes cash games would be the way to go.

Another reason for my scepticism is around Ketola himself. To put it politely, he does not seem like someone whose word we should take seriously in this industry. The marketing strategy his casino has looks like it was created by a 14-year-old boy. It's full of clickbait, trolling, pornography, and sick jokes. Ketola has also shown himself to be a terrible racist, who is very happy to publicly blurt out racial slurs to get attention. My point is that this is a person who clearly would have no issue with playing a pretend high stakes cash game for publicity.

This is one of the reasons why I've always been much more enamoured by tournament poker than cash games. There is an honesty in tournaments where all the seat draws are random. High-stakes cash games, by comparison, have a lot of smoke and mirrors. There is more politics behind the scenes and more gamesmanship at the tables. Plus, in tournaments, we tend to get to see the best in the world against the best in the world, whereas in cash games, as you can see here, anyone who has the money can pull up and be celebrated as if they are a champion.

For the record, I think pretty much all of the high-stakes cash game streams we see are 100% legitimate in terms of the money being played for. That includes the record-breaking High Stakes Poker stream that happened last month. But when it involves someone who's known for morally dubious publicity stunts, you'll forgive me for being a little bit sceptical