High Stakes Poker Season 4: Worth the Wait!
by Michael Cheser

So, why were armed security guards stationed everywhere you looked at GSN's recent taping of season 4 of High Stakes Poker? Maybe it had something to do with the more than five million dollars sitting on top of one poker table. In what became the biggest cash game in television history, eight players bought in for a minimum half-million dollars of their own money. The ponderous piles of $50,000 cash bricks created green partitions between the players, leaving several of them cramped for table space.

Let's take a closer look at this landmark table:

Seat 1: Antonio Esfandiari
Seat 2: Sam Farha
Seat 3: David Benyamine
Seat 4: Patrik Antonius
Seat 5: Guy Laliberté
Seat 6: Jamie Gold
Seat 7: Doyle Brunson
Seat 8: Barry Greenstein

Wait List #1: Daniel Negreanu

Laliberté, the least well-known of the group, is the billionaire founder of the Cirque du Soleil empire. Despite having played poker for just eighteen months, he made the final table of last month's WPT World Championship. A noted philanthropist, Laliberté pledged to donate 50% of any winnings to the One Drop Foundation, an organization he formed with the objective of improving drinking water in the developing world.

So what happened at this historic table? Well, any game with Sam Farha or Jamie Gold is bound to have action, and this was no exception. Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands. Outrageous bluffs were perpetrated. Heartbreak river cards were spiked. And are poker fans ready for the first million dollar pot on television? They better be!

But this was just the grand finale of three days of action that GSN taped for the upcoming season of High Stakes Poker. The other two sessions, with the regular $100,000 minimum buy-in, featured plenty familiar faces, as well as several newcomers. Returning from previous seasons were Eli Elezra, Phil Hellmuth, Todd Brunson, Jennifer Harman, Phil Laak, and Mike Matusow. Fresh faces included Haralabos Voulgaris, Brian Brandon, Antonio Salorio, Mike Baxter, Bob Safai, Brandon Adams, and Phil "OMGClayAiken" Galfond.

Unlike certain stretches of season three, these tables never lacked action. For one entire session, the table agreed that any player winning a pot with seven-deuce would collect $500 from everyone else at the table. The $1,200 straddle was a regular fixture and, when that was not enough, a $2,400 re-straddle took over. Players raised and bet "in the dark". All-in players "ran it twice" and negotiated insurance deals with their table mates. In a single five hour period, there were seventeen all-ins, with eleven of them called! Can you say "rebuy"?

If the table banter is what draws you to HSP, you are in for a treat also. The tongues were wagging non-stop. Here are just a few of the gems to look forward to:

• Hellmuth, to one of the new, unknown players: "I won't attack you. Unless you play bad. Against me."
• Harman, facetiously, to Farha: "Sammy, do you consider yourself a nit or a gambler?" Farha, in reply: "I wish I could be a nit. It would save me a lot of money."
• Gold: "I'll never be the best player, but I think I have the chance to be the best bluffer."
• Negreanu, to Hellmuth: "You could make money selling 'Phil Hellmuth' underwear!"
• Doyle Brunson, when another player showed a horrible hand after pulling off a huge bluff: "Now I remember how I became a millionaire."

Many players who appear on High Stakes Poker - especially first-timers who are unfamiliar to the viewing audience - are equally concerned about their television image as they are about winning money. Not so, for Brandon Adams. Just before joining the game several hours into the taping, he had this to say: "I play very fast and my game matches up well with other players who also play fast ... the thing about playing on TV is you want to continue playing your style and not slow down."

Likewise, Jamie Gold claimed to be unconcerned about his image. "I don't even think about it. I think it's a really destructive thing to worry about the cameras. You have to play your game and not worry about it. If people are impressed with it, that's great. If people want to say that I played horribly, there's not much I can do about it. I did the first show for fun, to do a show, and I ended up losing eighty thousand dollars. This time, I decided that I wasn't going to be having a lot of fun - I was just there to play. I was going to focus and win money. I came to win."

Gold and Hellmuth tangled in a number of pots and had a few choice words for each other along the way. After the taping, when asked if any genuine hard feelings existed between them, Gold had this to offer about the Poker Brat: "That's just the way that he is. He absolutely wants to beat me and I absolutely want to beat him. He believes that he's the best player in the world and nobody can come close to him, and I believe that I can compete with him."

Every television show has a dedicated team behind the scenes and for High Stakes Poker, that team includes Henry Orenstein, Executive Producer (and inventor of the hole card camera), Eric Drache, Executive Consultant, and Mori Eskandani, also Executive Consultant and the man most responsible for coordinating the details of the actual taping.

In addition to making sure everything comes together on the set, Eskandani plays a fundamental role in deciding which players appear. As he explains: "Most of these players ... they've been friends and playing together for a long time. So we have a core of cash game players and this is their world, and then we introduce new players to them. We rely on [these] players introducing who would be good action, good talk. We have to be careful not to put people who don't know each other together. You put six people in there who don't know each other and they're not going to talk."

Eskandani, a professional poker player in his own right, recruited two of this season's new players - Mike Baxter and Bob Safai - while playing tournaments and cash games in Los Angeles. He recognized that they were action players with great table presence and figured they would be ideal for the High Stakes Poker format. Ultimately, he was proven correct.

Sometimes, however, predictions don't work out as planned. Asked if he would ever pull a player who was not living up to expectations, Eskandani was emphatic: "We tell them before they sit down, 'if it looks like you don't belong, we're going to ask you to leave.' After all, it's a television show. You can't have bad poker and good TV, or good poker and bad TV. It has to be good poker and good TV."

High Stakes Poker Season 4 will air as thirteen episodes on GSN, beginning in late September 2007. Need one more enticement to mark your calendar? Here's one more delicious quote for you:

Phil Hellmuth, visibly steaming: "They just try to give me their money! It's the same as last time!"

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Photos courtesy of GSN

About the Author:
After successful careers in the financial and high-tech industries, Michael Cheser became fascinated with poker in early 2006. Defying all probabilities, he managed to cash in the 2006 WSOP Main Event. When not tournament reporting for PokerPages, he can be seen at no-limit tables in Las Vegas, cheerfully calling large river bets with second-best hands..