Charles Yu and Garrett Adelstein Dominate the WPT Super High Stakes Game
5 minutes
Last Updated: January 25, 2024
It was the biggest day of the WPT World Championship festival thus far, as more than 1,500 players made their way to the Encore Ballroom to play in the final Day 1 flight of the biggest guaranteed poker tournament of all time.
The WPT fell just short of shattering the $40 million guarantee they had set on the event, but the day was a massive success in every other way, as players across the board are calling this event one of the best organized poker tournaments ever.
And while hundreds of players were fighting for their place in Day 2 of the Main Event, the big stage was reserved for a different kind of poker game altogether.
The TV table saw the likes of Andrew Robl, Garrett Adelstein, Santosh Suvarna, and Matt Berkey play one of the biggest TV cash games in recent months, with the return of Adelstein to the green felt definitely being the biggest story of the day.
While WPT is relatively new in showing cash games like this one to live audiences, the production was on a very high level, and the game itself lived up to all the expectations, with massive 6-figure pots, table banter, and much more offered over more than 7 hours of running time.
Big Day for the Pros, Suvarna Takes a Big Hit
It’s not quite every day that we see a cash game as big as this one run in any casino out there. With stakes set at $300/600 and all the players ready to gamble it up, the WPT Super High Stakes Cash Game was always going to be a massive one.
As expected, it was Andrew Robl and Garrett Adelstein that drove most of the action, with the two aggressive pros doing what they do best in making big bets across all the street, but also getting some great cards this time around.
The likes of Charles Yu, Matt Berkey, and Santosh Suvarna joined the game a bit late, while players like Sean Dempsey, Han, and Sosia Jiang, whom we have had a chance to see in WPT cash games earlier, were there battling with the pros from minute one.
It didn’t take long for the first massive pot of the day to go down, as Adelstein’s pocket Aces made a full house on a board of [invalid notations], and facing aggression from a player as capable of bluffing as Garrett, he decided to pay off the river shove.
The pot reached a total of $203,000 in the end and sent Han to the rail, as Adelstein made a $100k profit in the first half hour of the game and never really looked back.
Things kept going right for G-Man, as Suvarna joined the table and bluffed off some $60k into the stoic pro with his straight and flush draw, a bluff that Adelstein was able to sniff out and call off with his pair of Jacks.
Adelstein’s day kept going in the right direction for the duration, while Andrew Robl also managed to fly high and build on his million dollar stack over the course of the seven hours of play.
Tallying Up the Numbers
The biggest winner for the day, however, was Charles Yu, who showed up for the game quite late but was able to dominate the table and win a total of $331k over just a few hours of play.
Adelstein followed s close behind with $254k in profit, taking his score to two for two since his long-awaited return to the live cash game scene.
Andrew added to his all-time winnings with another $188k score, ensuring that he remains sitting at the top of the list of biggest televised cash game winners of all time.
Only two players lost money on the day, with Suvarna and Dempsey dropping nearly a cool million dollars on the table, $724k of which came from Santosh’s stack.
It was a day to forget for Suvarna, who played his characteristically loose and gamblish style, but also run particularly bad in all the big spots and was not able to make the big hands when it mattered the most.
Adelstein Is Well and Truly Back
When Garrett Adelstein announced his long-awaited return to streamed games after more than a year away from the tables, there were some doubts as to whether or not he would be able to compete and live up to his reputation.
Those doubts were quickly dispersed over G-Man’s first week back in the game, as he was among the big winners in both the Wednesday’s Bally Live Poker game and yesterday’s WPT cash game stream in the Encore Ballroom.
As humble as we are used to seeing him, Garrett admitted to playing some hands somewhat poorly in Wednesday’s session, and will be the first to say that he made some mistakes yesterday as well, but those mistakes certainly didn’t stop him from taking home over a quarter of a million.
Knowing the kind of competitor Adelstein is, we can expect to see plenty more of him in the near future, as streams left and right will be fighting to get G-Man do what he does best on their live channels.
WPT World Championship Continues Today
Registration for the WPT World Championship event closed at dinner break yesterday, with the massive guarantee of $40 million just nearly missed, and the Tour forced to add some $2.4 million into the prize pool to honor the guarantee.
The massive feat of bringing nearly 4,000 players out to play a $10k championship during the busiest day of poker this year was accomplished by the folks at WPT, who have assured us that the investment they were forced to make into the growth of poker at this time is well worth it in their eyes.
Day 2 action started at 11:00 am this morning across the Encore poker rooms, with 1,375 players returning with a dream of being the next WPT world champion.
Stay tuned for more updates from the Championship in the coming days, as we give you live news from the event itself, as well as notable side events, including the upcoming $1 Million Big One for One Drop event, which will be starting next week.
