ShareImage courtesy of PokerGO.com
Shaun Deeb may have won the slowroll contest last night but Mike Matusow took down the match as the pair battled out the undercard of the Negreanu-Persson High Stakes Duel IV showdown at the PokerGO studios in Las Vegas.
Matusow and Deeb ponied up $10k apiece for the winner-takes-all heads-up fight and it started out in Deeb’s favour, the Troy, NY-born pro winning the first nine hands.
Mike the Mouth fought back valiantly, taking the lead in the following hand, Deeb check-calling Matusow’s triple-barrel flush-draw-turned-flush all the way to the end...
Matusow: 10♠ 7♠
Deeb: K♣ 8♥
Flop: 8♠ K♠ 2♣
Turn: J♠
River: 4♣
The chip lead would swing back-and-forth for the next two hours, neither player able to capitalise on small leads, until inevitably rising blinds played a part in the denouement...
That meant victory for Matusow and a tidy $10k profit, with an enjoyable match for poker fans looking forward to the High Stakes Duel IV Main Event .
The Main Event on May 8th and 9th at the PokerGO studios will see Daniel Negreanu face off against Eric Persson, the loudmouthed CEO of Maverick Gaming.
Round 1 of their battle will cost each player $50,000, the loser rematching for another $100k, with person making his HSD debut and Negreanu hoping to improve on his 3-0 loss to Phil Hellmuth.
That $400k whitewash courtesy of Hellmuth’s “white magic” came in HSD II, with Hellmuth having already scooped $400,00 by defeating Antonio Esfandiari 3-0 in the inaugural HSD.
Highstakes Duel III was an altogether different affair, Hellmuth facing four different opponents before losing his crown. First up he beat amateur player Nick Wright for $50k, the Fox Sports host unable to justify spending $100k on a rematch.
Tom Dwan stepped in as a replacement for round 2, toppling the Poker Brat but then losing the $400k rematch. When a scheduling conflict meant Dwan couldn’t make the $800k decider, Scott Seiver stepped in.
Hellmuth saw off Seiver’s challenge but his next opponent would prove to be the toughest of all, Jason Koon.
First up there was talk of Bryn Kenney as the challenger for round 5, although that talk mostly came from the Brooklyn man himself.
With Kenney still under a cloud of suspicion due to cheating allegations at the time, squeaky-clean Koon got the potentially lucrative gig, and he turned up with an anti-Hellmuth strategy to win the $1.6million showdown.
With the stakes now at the eye-watering $3.2million level, it wasn’t completely surprising that highstakes crusher Koon got no takers at the start of the year.
That almost brings us full circle to the Negreanu-Persson battle due this week. If DNegs’ wins, there could well be a Negreanu-Hellmuth rematch on the cards, while if Persson comes out ahead we might see another car-crash battle if Hellmuth decides to challenge him.
As always, we’ll bring you the very best of the highstakes clashes right here, so be sure to check in regularly!
