Crazy Prop Bets For the RunItOnce Crew

Prop bet season is well and truly open it seems, the much-publicised ‘Pitch Dark Bathroom Challenge’ taking pride of place, and this week Phil Galfond’s ‘Run It Once’ crew have been musing on their own craziest bets…

Drink until you drop for $20,000?

Of course, as with the generally-recognised as dangerous bathroom bet between Vegas pros Rory Young and Rich Alati, not all these should be tried at home. In particular John Andress and his “Watching Darren Elias drinking an entire bottle of ‘Jack’ in 10 minutes and not vomiting!”

The $20,000 bet was won by Elias, but people have actually died during these alcohol-based wagers, so tread – and drink – carefully.

Tom Dwan’s $50k chess disaster

With chess much in the news this past month due to the World Championship match attended by Liv Boeree and Igor Kurganov among other poker favourites, the favourite of Jen Shahade (herself a chess master and poker pro) was when her brother Greg took $50,000 from Tom Dwan.

Even offering Dwan ‘rook odds’ (which means Greg would play with a rook less) as Jen points out:

“As we say in poker, it seems like Tom Dwan was drawing dead!”  

Run It Once supremo Phil Galfond also recalled this as his favourite, saying of Dwan’s rather foolish challenge:

“He lost…decisively!”

No footage of that prop bet unfortunately, but here’s some of our biggest poker stars in action on the 64 squares…

Grinding out the win?

Among the others to reminisce on crazy prop bets past and present were Joni Jouhkimainen and Seth Davies.

The latter attempted a leaderboard challenge early in his career, a six figure sum on the line if he completed it. However, as Seth explains:

“It just ended up being 12+ hours a day, every single day for the month of February. It just rattled me…I ended up losing…”

Perhaps Jouhkimainen should have asked Seth for advice before taking on his own personal bet this year.

The Finnish legend explained:

“I have one currently on that means I have to play 500,000 hands online this year – for me that’s quite crazy ‘cos I’m not that grinder type!”

At least it should kill the variance factor, rather than Joni himself!

Doubtless 2019 will bring with it a whole new swathe of prop bets – and we’ll bring you the best of them as usual on PokerTube!