Scott Margereson and Doug Polk Make Two of the Greatest Folds in Recent Poker History

07:17
02 May

Live poker has been dead in the water for a year now. Hopefully it won’t be too long before major events start to kick off again, but the wait is starting to drag more than a little.

We greatly miss the excitement of the heavyweights battling for millions of dollars across a real poker table. The stare downs and the table talk adds an extra dimension to the game that the fans love. As great as online poker is, live poker is real poker, as it was originally played.

To help with the boredom we have taken a look through some of the best hands we could find from just before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold until today. These beauties seen below, and we’re sure you will agree, are two of the best laydowns we’ve ever seen, including one recent hand played on High stakes Poker.

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#1 Scott Margereson $10,300 partypoker MILLIONS Main Event Bahamas

Scott Margereson is a British MTT pro who used to specialise in the online game but has found great success in the live game winning millions of dollars. He has a WPT title to his name and this fold below is one of the very best you will ever see. Fantastic hand reading.

The blinds are 200k/400k with a 400k ante. Margereson opens from UTG+1 to 900k and Ludovic Geilich flat calls his pocket jacks on the button.

The flop comes down 5c 7h Qc. Margereson and Geilich checks behind with his second pair.

The turn is the Jh. Margereson now leads out of 2,000,000 and Geilich raises to 6,800,000. Margereson only calls with top two.

The river is the 3s. Margereson checks and Geilich bets 18,500,000 into a 16,400,000 pot.

It’s almost impossible for Geilich to have any kind of a strong hand here except the exact hand that he has. Margereson clearly puts all the pieces of the puzzle together and makes a great fold that we expect even most decent players would be able to make, claiming a GTO call.

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#2 Doug Polk High Stakes Poker vs. Phil Hellmuth

This seven-handed $200-$400 cash game is full of poker’s big names and all about the action.
In the hijack, Hellmuth raises to $1,100 with Qs Th. James Bord calls pocket twos on the button, and Polk overcalls Td 7c in the big blind.

The flop is Js 9s 8h giving two players a straight!

Hellmuth and Polk both check and Bord stabs with a $2,000 bet, hoping to take it down. But Polk then raises it up to $7,000.

Hellmuth barely thinks before jamming the rest of his chips for a $97,200 overbet and Polk has him covered.

Now, when you see these high stakes live games that are filmed for entertainment purposes, they are usually quite splashy because that’s what the crowd likes. So, it makes sense that there are very few spots that ever come up where a player will only ever continue with the absolute nuts.

For this reason it is all the more impressive that Polk manages to make a fold here, regardless of the fact that it’s such a huge bet. For all of Hellmuth’s reputation that he is such a nit, he is capable of pulling off the occasional huge bluff.

Kudos to both players for finding these great folds.

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