Gaby Livshitz raised to 2,000 and Aleksejs Ponjakovs three-bet to 6,200 for Livshitz to call. On the 10♣4♣2♠ flop, Livshitz checked and then folded when Ponakovs bet the pot.
Tim Van Loo then opened to 2,000 and Livshitz raised the pot for Van Loo to call. On a flop of Q♦J♣8♦, Livshitz potted for 13,200 and Van Loo folded to get shown the "key card" A♦.
Three-way action became two after Barny Boatman three-bet to 2,800 and Nick Schulman slid out a four-bet to 9,800. Boatman made the call and the 6♥K♣4♣ flop was revealed.
Schulman bet enough to put Boatman all in and the call was made. The 2♥ turn and 7♥ river did not help Boatman, as Schulman turned over A♥A♦7♠5♣ to take down the pot.
Scott Ball in the small blind and Josh Arieh in the big blind were heads up to the K♥5♦3♠ turn. Ball check-called a bet from Arieh and the 3♥ turn was revealed.
Ball checked again, with Arieh firing 4,000 into the middle. The call was made to see the A♠ river, where both players checking it down. Ball showed A♥5♣3♣2♠ for a full house, while Arieh tapped the table as he mucked.
With some 32,000 in the middle to the K♠9♥9♠4♥K♥ river, Brian Hastings checked and the button made it 12,000 to go. Hastings check-raised the pot to 48,400 with one hundred chips behind. His opponent eventually called and Hastings tabled the K♦K♣4♠4♣ for quads.
According to Jan-Peter Jachtmann, the pot had been three ways preflop and the turn was checked.
Following three limpers, Anthony Zinno in the small blind made it 3,000 to go and three opponents came along to the A♣6♣4♥ flop. It checked around and Zinno led the 4♠ turn for 6,000, picking up a single caller.
They checked the 8♦ river and Zinno could not beat Q♠10♠9♦4♣ to lose a portion of his stack.
Earlier this year on an ordinary Monday afternoon, a bespectacled man walked into the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop on Las Vegas Blvd. Tucked under his arm was an uninteresting box that only he knew contained something rather interesting – a pair of gold watches dating back more than 40 years.
These were not your run-of-the-mill wristwear, but rather evidence of a unique and often overlooked time of poker history, a year when the World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet, now the game’s highest accolade, was replaced in favor of watches.
1982 WSOP watches
The man holding the box was David Sklansky, who in 1978 forever changed poker by advocating a mathematical approach to the game in his groundbreaking book The Theory of Poker. Nicknamed “The Mathematician,” he proved his prowess just four years later when he won two WSOP tournaments in five days.
First, he won the 1982 WSOP Event #7: $800 Mixed Doubles Limit Seven Card Stud, a tournament that paired one man with one woman, alongside Dani Kelly, and followed that up by taking down Event #12: $1,000 Limit 5-Card Draw High. A year later, the Binions reverted back to the beloved bracelets players know today, and Sklansky captured his third piece of WSOP hardware by winning Event #11: $1,000 Limit Omaha.
It was a remarkable accomplishment, and for more than four decades he’s kept safe the evidence of his victories, both of which still worked. So, why was Sklansky carrying his 1982 WSOP gold watches, two of only 15 ever awarded, into a pawn shop? Well, he was looking to sell them of course, but not to just any of the dozens of pawn shops spread across Las Vegas. Oh no, he was walking into arguably the most famous pawn shop in the world, the home to the wildly popular television show Pawn Stars, and he was there to do it with cameras rolling.
