888 Hand of the Week: Flopped Royal Flush, Rivered Quads Beats Full House
Flopping big in pot-limit Omaha is not rare, but flopping the stone-cold nuts and rivering the second nuts, leaving your heads-up opponent in third place with the best full house, is not something you see every day.
That's exactly what happened when Dana Belman flopped a royal flush and then rivered quads in Event #25: $1,000 Pot-Limit Omaha on Tuesday.
Belman held K? Q? 10? 10? and the flop came down A? 10? J?. He couldn't believe his eyes and was doing everything he could to keep his cool and act calm.
"The other player initially raised under the gun, so I put him on a high pair. At least, I was hoping he had a high pair. There was no reason for me to bet [the flop] unless I had air. Maybe if I had the naked K?, but for the most part, I'm just checking here. And sure enough, we both checked."
The turn was the 9?, and Belman was faced with a decision.
"I knew I had to get some value here," he said. "There was about 3,750 in the pot. I wanted to keep my bet reasonable because if he only had a big pair, he still might call. So I decided to bet 2,000. I wanted to build the pot and try to get it all in on the river to double up. He came along, and that's when I knew he had something."
Belman had a hard time believing his eyes when the 10? came on the river.
"I thought 'this is pretty crazy.' I've been gambling for twenty-five years, and I've never seen anything like this. If this happened online, they would think it was rigged. How on earth did this happen? I was just in outer space when the river hit."
Belman was struggling to figure out what he needed to do to get paid off.
"I figured if he filled up, we're getting it in anyways. So I decided to bet small. That way if he had nothing, maybe he would try to bluff me. So I only bet 3,000, and he rushed to grab all his chips, and my poor little heart skipped a beat."
His opponent moved all in and Belman called instantly. His opponent revealed A? A? 8? Q? for aces full, the third best possible hand.
According to Belman, the table just sort of took all in and there wasn't all that much excitement around the hand. JC Tran was at the table and thought it was pretty cool, though. He weighed in with #WillNeverHappenAgain as he shared it with his Twitter followers.
Insane hand. In a headsup pot in the 1k PLO, Aces full came in 3rd place. #WillNeverHappenAgain https://t.co/lm4dGihYdt
— JC TRAN (@jctran23)
Not that we don't trust Tran, who won a pot-limit Omaha bracelet in 2009, but in our quest to determine how rare this hand was, we asked Mike Gorodinsky, one of the best PLO players in the game today.
"Oh, it's super rare. You will never ever see that again."
