The biggest poker cash games of 2021: Bilzerian, Perkins and others on GGPoker

Bill Perkins

Bill Perkins didn’t show up on the digital felt that often in 2021, but when he did he immediately racked up long waiting lists at all the limits he played. He seemed to prefer playing shorter sessions, but in the biggest games available – NLHE $500/1,000.

He was clearly looking for action from the high rollers:

GASTRADER: Boredom, can you, Bitcoin millionaires, stop being nits?

T Kuznetsov: Haha, I'm up for a bigger game – 0.5 btc/1 btc?

After a lengthy absence, Bill finally returned to the GG client towards the very end of the year and found his way into some far from soft 3-way action.

Yet he did manage to win the odd hand or two.

Perkins didn’t find himself in the biggest pots, but Timofey Kuznetsov showed up in a lot of them.

A reminder to myself –" Bill wrote after his latest high stakes bout– "Never play poker after a Christmas party!!

In the middle of the year Bill also played an unusual heads-up match with Landon Tyson, in which he came away ahead by $376,400.

Bill's results in December according to SmartHand:

Poker downswings are unlikely to have a serious impact on Bill's mood. Dan Bilzerian recently joined the More Plates More Dates podcast and answered questions for three hours, including about Perkins.

– “The difference between having $ 100 million and $ 1 billion is not that much” – said Dan – “You can have the yacht, a few more houses, don’t get me wrong I’m chasing the billion like everybody else. But the difference between having $100 million having ******* zero, that’s a lot bigger.
An example I like to use in gambling is – if you have $100 million net worth and somebody offers you 10 / 1 on a coin flip, do you take it? I’m never taking the flip.
My buddy Bill for instance was worth $400-500 million at one point. I was like ‘dude, Lower your risk profile, Stop gambling with so much money.’ He was all into this natural gas stuff and whatever. But he lost like $300-350 million. ‘Dude, like you’re now in a different spot’!
It seems to me that the more money you have, the more risk averse you should be. When you have a smaller net worth, take the shots, if you go broke it’s not that big of a drop from where you were.
I don’t know man, but it worked out for Bob [probably talking about Vulgaris], he rode that Bitcoin down to $3,000, sold his house for like $17 million, bought more Bitcoin, sold his plane, bought more Bitcoin and now the guy’s at almost a billion! But I think it was still dumb.”

Ludumann

An unknown player with a Russian flag appeared on GG in July. Unlike Bill, he played exclusively in PLO and immediately held marathon sessions.

His tables didn’t fill up right away.

Sometimes he had to play heads-ups.

In one of the sessions, he reached a $1 million stack.

In another, he took down a huge pot.

However, it all ended with a string of lost all-ins.

After that, Ludumann disappeared for several months, before returning in October for several more marathon sessions.

He managed to win a sizable chunk back again at the very beginning.

But it all ended with a big loss, the details are in our October review.

ImagineKing

This handle is familiar to all high stakes fans in the know, as he’s been filling the pockets of high stakes players on PokerStars for close to a decade.

And in December of this year he showed up on GG, to the delight of the regulars.

– I don't really get off on trips to live tournaments, – Nikita Bodyakovsky admitted on his latest stream. – But it's great for me to grind cash or tournaments online. There are a lot of games now, an old-school VIP ImagineKing comes every day – he’s a rock star from China. I played with him for the first time about 8 years ago. There are, of course, older VIPs, sometimes there are players I played with back in 2010. But with him, fun games take place on a regular basis. There’s enough action and the stakes are very tempting, he plays four tables for $200/$400, and that’s exactly what gets me as excited as possible.

In one of the sessions, Truteller suggested that the Chinese star should raise the stakes:

Imagine_ King played 14k hands in December and lost almost $1 million.

Sr12

This player – who decided to conquer NL100k playing a 93% VPIP – also made an indelible impression on the regulars.

He played less than 300 hands with a loserate of 1.195 bb/100.

Sr12 played the "most epic-crazy" session against Inner, and the most memorable pot against Sergey Nikiforov. He went into detail in an interview with our website:

There was one particular hand which I think turned it around for me a lot: in my experience I just don’t win these kinds of pots. It was at the NL20k table: a regular opened to 2bb in UTG, I 3-bet to 7bb with KK in MP. In the SB an amateur player clicks it back to 14bb, I 5-bet to 26bb! After a long series of re-raises, we still went all in for just under 200bb, the SB showed a solid 93o! The flop came down a monotone 532, giving SB a pair and a flush draw, and me no flush draw. I’d already opened the cashier tab to rebuy. But blanks on the turn and river saved me. The most epic 100bb of exposure in my life!

Heads-ups

Without the involvement of the players we mentioned above, it is unlikely to see a return of 6-max at the highest limits. But heads-up challenges between regulars have picked up a second wind.

The duel between Daniel Negreanu and Doug Polk formally ended this year, but it became the main poker event of 2020.

But even without their match, the outgoing year gave heads-up fans a lot of spectacles to enjoy.

The attention of our community was entirely focused on the match between Stefan Burakov and Viktor Malinovsky.

It all started with the opponents exchanging some quite aggressive needles.

And it ended with Stefan's unconditional victory on a friendly stream.

Stefan then turned his sights on the Spanish regular Tuti88. They played a match of 50,000 hands, for which Stefan gave Tuti88 an advantage of 4bb/100.

Stefan himself gave little comment on this match, but Tuti gave two interviews to the Spanish website Poker-Red. The first is based on the results after 25,000 hands, where he came out ahead by $ 150k.

And the latter is already admitting defeat.

Hector Alvarez (Tuti88) revealed that he rejected Stefan's mid-match offer to finish the bet ahead of schedule.

– Yes, there was something interesting. In the middle of the call, right after our first interview or a little earlier, he wrote to me: "Today is a very good day. How do you like the idea of going our separate ways? You're a great player, but getting up at 4 in the morning for our match, in my opinion, is a bad idea for both of us. Can we finish the challenge right now?"

– And you didn't want to leave when you were in the black?

– Yes, I refused. He said that he had been preparing for our match for a long time, and spent a lot of time and effort on it. I asked for compensation for early graduation, but he refused.

The next day he contacted me again: "How do you like this idea – I’ll make a donation of $50,000 to any public fund of your choice, and we’ll finish? It’d be good for humanity..." But I said that I thought the action was too good and I didn't want to quit the game when there were such high expectations, especially when I’d invested so much time in it.

We never agreed. He asked how much of a donation would change my mind. I replied that there was none. He also offered me a place in the WPT heads-up championship for $25k, which was starting around then. It was very tempting, but I still didn't agree.

We continued to play, and my worst hit came in the last 10-12 sessions. There were a few days when I lost 10 buy-ins. And the worst was the last session, when I lost 21 buy-ins over 1,200 hands.

After BERRI SWEET psychologically destroyed Raúlgonzalez in limit games, he switched to face Hold'em specialists. This year his main rivals were Makeboifin and LLinusLLove.

In April, Makeboifin announced that he was ending the match with BERRI:

– How is your match with BERRI going? What do you think about his game? Did his match with LLinusLLove end or did they take a break?

– Just today I decided that I won't play with him anymore. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't terrible either. I'm a BERRI fanboy, this guy is a ******* psychopath.

– Why did you decide to quit?

– Lately he's been ******* me, and I couldn't stand such beatings anymore.

– What’s your favourite hand you played against BERRI? Some kind of non-showdown hand that we didn't see on the forums?

– We had a ridiculously large amount of completely insane hands, but my favourite is this one (because it worked)

In the fall, they still continued the match and played a sensational call with jack-high.

BERRI SWEET and Makeboifin continue their heads-up duel. They've been playing $50/$100 for the last few weeks.
In the last session, BERRI made a J-high call for a pot of 200BB (screenshot below). He even went to 2+2 to celebrate (https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=57424900&postcount=91):
– This morning I had a flashback of a famous call from Stu Ungar while playing Omaha-Hi. I'm not lying. And I'm not claiming that I made a call because of that. Rather, it was due to GTO, blockers, range division and other **** that modern youth is fond of. But I really had a flashback, it's true. It's just unbelievable.
Stu Ungar actually made his famous call against Mansur Matlubi with T-high, you can read more about this in our material.

On GG – where BERRI doesn’t play – Marcus became one of the most successful high rollers of the year (all statistics on GG appeared on SmartHand in April).