A $1,000-$2,000 pot-limit Omaha hand on the crypto poker site CoinPoker (shown above) is being dubbed the largest pot in the 20-plus year history of online poker.
The hand, which doesn’t have a date attached to it, is according to a grainy video posted on Twitter by poker player Rob Young. It was between European casino owner/poker player Leon Tsoukernik and European politician/poker player Antanas “Tony G” Guoga.
Both men held a pair of aces in their PLO starting hands, and all the money went in preflop, generating a pot worth a massive $1.8 million, the video shows. CoinPoker uses the so-called stablecoin known as Tether, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar 1:1.
The board ran out safe for both players, and they each got roughly $900,000 back.
The hand is larger in value than a $1.3 million hand played between Patrik Antonius and Viktor “Isildur1” Blom from way back in 2009. That hand was played at $500-$1,000 PLO.
The Antonius-Blom hand is widely considered the previous record.
It’s impossible to say with certainty what is the real record, as some high-stakes players in the past have used smaller stakes or denominations online to actually play the hand for much larger stakes behind the scenes, with the money being exchanged privately.
During the year 2020, which was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the record online no-limit hold’em hand was played on GGPoker. American Ali Imsirovic won nearly $1 million at a shorthanded table after hitting a flush with AK (pictured below).
Also on GGPoker in 2020, Wiktor Malinowski and Michael Addamo played a $842,000 hand with Malinowski scooping it all with aces against his opponent’s pocket kings.