Crazy cash game going on in Macau; Phil Ivey up $2 million!

The Las Vegas of Asia: the island of Macau, is the center of live high stakes poker action at the moment. A group of filthy rich Chinese businessmen involved in mainly the gambling industry decided two years ago that instead of losing tens of millions of dollars per year playing Baccarat, it was more fun and better for their wallet to play some high stakes poker.

According to a poster on the 2+2 forums, the men started to play in a semi-private game in the VIP Club from the Starworld Hotel. Over the course of two years some of them took private coaches and became really good players, others are still hopelessly bad. They have one thing in common though, they all crave action.

That’s also probably the reason they started inviting some top professionals to the game. The businessmen like players who take their own action and are not staked by ten other players. In the cash games that were started this Saturday, Phil Ivey, Tom ‘Durrrr’ Dwan, Ted Forrest, Johnny Chan, John Juanda and Jeffrey Lisandro played on two separate tables.

The action is still going on at the time of writing (Monday afternoon in Europe) on two tables. On the ‘smaller’ table Jeffrey Lisandro and Ted Forrest and a few of the Chinese regulars are playing either 2k/4k or 5k/10k. That’s Hong Kong Dollars though, so the 5k/10k game is roughly equivalent to $325/$650. At the bigger table Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey and two businessmen are playing 10k/20k HK Dollar with a reported 20k ante (to force the pros to play, LOL). So that deepstacked poker with $650/$1,300 blinds and a $1,300 ante. On Sunday they even played $1,300/$2,600 for a while.

At the moment the big winner of the game is Phil Ivey, who is up over 2 million US Dollars. Ivey was down for a big part of the weekend but apparently turned the tides. Tom Dwan is also up: $260,000. Johnny Chan and John Juanda are both down for a few 100k, while two visitors from Beijing are down more than 1 million US Dollars each.

The biggest pot of the weekend was between Dwan and Ivey. On a flop of Axx, they were both all-in on a 3 turn, Dwan turns over A3, Phil AK, river…. K. That pot was worth HK$10.000.000 x 0.13 = $1.300.000! We’ll keep you posted..

Update:

Game has broken, play will probably continue tomorrow. Picture taken from the game (wit John Juanda in the back):

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