The biggest ever televised heads-up poker match just happened, to the tune of $20 million. At a casino on Jeju Island, South Korea, poker legend Patrik Antonius went up against crypto casino owner Ossi Ketola, and the result was a gruelling four and a half hours of poker.
Antonius is a Poker Hall of Famer, one of the most feared and most watched cash game players who has ever lived. Ossi “Monarch” Ketola, also Finnish, made his fortune from CS:GO skin gambling and his current crypto casino ventures. A few years ago, reportedly, he didn’t know the rules of the game.
It was a surprisingly even match, with the commentators lauding Ketola’s play at various junctures. This clearly isn’t the Ketola who was getting cleaned out by professionals in smaller heads-up battles at previous events.The gap between them never really exceeded $2 million either way, until a hand befitting the stakes arrived just past the four-hour mark.
Antonius opened for $100,000 with K♦️9♠️ and Ketola 3-bet to $350,000 with Q♥️9♥️. The flop came Q♠️8♥️J♥️, giving Ketola top pair with a flush draw and a straight draw. He checked it. Antonius took a stab for $175,000 with his gutshot and was instantly check-raised to $525,000. The Finnish legend took a second, called, and the dream turn card came off — for Ketola.
The T♥️ brought in Ossi’s straight flush, while Antonius hit his gutshot straight. Ketola checked once again, and Antonius had to think he had the best hand, betting $625,000 and leaving himself just over $4 million behind. Ketola found the play every poker player loves making, the double check-raise, bumping it up to $1.6 million. The always stoic Antonius took little time before calling. The river 3♣️ was a pure blank, and Ossi took seconds before putting in the rest of Antonius’s chips. He thought it over with clear discomfort, counted his stack, and found the fold, putting his straight in the muck.
Antonius joked about whether he was allowed to know if he’d just been bluffed, before looking down at A♦️K♦️ the very next hand. Ossi opened K♣️J♣️ for $250,000. Antonius resumed the stoic face and slid out a raise to $850,000. Ossi took little time before pushing all in, and all of a sudden Antonius was a huge favourite in an $8.15 million pot, and very much back in the match.
While the dealer prepared to run out the board, Antonius was still poking Ketola about whether he’d made a good fold. “Secret,” smiled Ossi. Antonius replied: “There are no secrets between you and I, you know that.” He might not be wrong. Antonius is publicly tied to Ketola’s casino as a business partner, though neither man has ever spelled out the arrangement, and he’s the person who brought Ketola into poker in the first place allegedly.
The Q♠️9♠️5♣️ flop was a little scary for Antonius, adding outs and a backdoor flush for his protégé, but the killer J♠️ turn was the dagger, before the $20 million bout ended on the 7♣️.
For the past few decades, heads-up poker has always been the action driver at the highest stakes. Whether it was Andy Beal, the Texas billionaire, challenging accomplished pros to heads-up mixed game matches at the Bellagio, Tom “durrrr” Dwan setting up the online durrrr Challenge, or the celebrity and VIP circuit, where well-known poker figures and wealthy amateurs battled mano a mano in private games.
The public never really got to see any of it until Ossi arrived on the high-stakes scene. He first battled Dan “Jungleman” Cates last year in Cyprus, losing around €13 million, and at Jeju at this time last year he scooped an $11 million pot off Alex Foxen, the biggest ever poker broadcast at the time (if you allow for the format), before outdoing it with a $12.7 million pot against Bjorn Li, still the largest we’ve seen on a poker livestream.
This week he took $6 million off well-known pro Wiktor “Limitless” Malinowski, before winning this monumental match against Antonius, a match where he admitted on stream that the $20 million mark made him “feel something.”
Antonius has been an ever-present in poker, the perpetual grinder who can commonly be found at the Bellagio or the Aria or wherever there’s a good high-stakes cash game running in the world. But it was a surprise to see him get this seat. His biggest heads-up claim to fame until now was losing the format’s most popular challenge many years ago to Dwan, battling no-limit hold’em and pot-limit Omaha on Full Tilt.
Seventeen years after losing poker’s most famous heads-up challenge, Antonius just lost its biggest one.
