Best Poker Prop Bets
Poker players love to gamble, especially when the bet is weird and wonderful. In this article, the Betfair Poker Blog takes a look at nine of the best poker prop bets in the history of the game.
- The “Friendly Bet” seemingly does not exist in poker. There is no such thing as a simple handshake bet, unless that hand is full of six-figures worth of cash. The bets are just as steep.
- Prop bets have always been a part of poker that has fascinated me and the ones poker players get up to often seem downright insane. As cool as poker can seem, there is nothing like a good prop bet to shine a light on how funny the game can be, and demonstrate the weird disconnect poker players have from the rest of society.
- The Top 10 best poker prop bets of all time: “Huck Seed once took a six figure bet that he could break 100 on a desert golf course” 15 Nov 2014 PokerPlayer Features PokerPlayers are renowned gamblers away from the tables as much as when they are at the tables.
If you happened to be strolling through the jam-packed hallways of the Rio All Suites Hotel & Casino earlier this year – soaking in the sights and sounds of the 2018 World Series of Poker (WSOP)– you might just have met a man dressed as a shark passing out $1 bills.
No, this wasn’t a promotional stunt for poker sunglasses company Blue Shark Optics or one of the weirdos who come to the WSOP every year looking to play dress-up.
Instead, recreational player Brandon Potter of Connecticut wore the shark costume while paying passersby a buck apiece to tell him a bad beat story.
During a segment of ESPN’s coverage of the WSOP Main Event, reporter Joe Stapleton caught up with Potter to find out exactly how he came to find himself in such a curious position.
As it turns out, Potter recently lost a “last longer” bet to a poker pal, with the mutually agreed upon punishment being a day spent listening to bad beat stories.
When his friend survived longer in the tournament both were playing, Potter came out on the wrong end of the painful prop bet, forcing him to don the carnivore costume while doing the worst dutyin poker.
As you can see here in this photo snapped by former Bluff Magazine editor Lance Bradley, Potter didn’t seem to be all that happy about his predicament, but then again, that’s the wholepoint.
Brandon Potter is paying people $1 to hear bad beat stories. He’s gotta get rid of $100 in two hours after losing a last longer bet.
I love the WSOP Main Event. pic.twitter.com/wQRsLGnFNx
In this post, I’m going to explore the weird and wonderful world of prop betting among poker players. You might think that these people are fully committed to their gambling on the felt, butthat’s obviously not enough excitement for them.
06:0012 Nov
When it comes to gambling, prop betting can take place on almost anything you could imagine-from the outcome of a football game to which cards appear on the flop in poker, to first scorer in basketball and a million other things.
More interesting, and often outrageous, dangerous or just hilariously funny, are the ‘poker prop bets’ which such gamblers resort to for fun, and which often entail a huge amount of money, or sometimes something more extreme….like getting a boob job if you lose!
Perhaps not so awful if you are female, but back in 1996 Brian “The Wiz” Zembic accepted a wager of $100,000 that he wouldn’t get 38C breast implants. Never one to shirk a dare, as we will see, Zembic went ahead with the operation and became the owner of a magnificent pair of tits- which he had to keep for one year to win the $100K.
19 years on and Zembic still proudly displays his ‘chest-ware’, done for free by a surgeon in exchange for dropping a backgammon debt. Such is the way of the gambler.
I got lazy, I was busy gambling, and, honestly, they grew on me,” stated Zembic in an interview with Maxim magazine shortly afterwards, adding the boast, “Plus it hasn’t hurt my ability to get girls. They don’t give a shit.”
This wasn’t the first outrageous prop bet Zembic had taken on. He once slept with homeless people under New York's 59th Street Bridge, which earned him $5000. The catch – and you know there always has to be one in prop bets – is that he had to do so with $10,000 of his own cash strapped to his leg.
And it is this kind of detail is what makes prop bets so interesting, amusing and addictive to the gambler. Just like in Luke Reinhardt’s famous novel ‘Diceman’, there also has to be a huge down-side to the bet to make it worthwhile wagering huge amounts of money.
One famous poker prop bet involved Howard Lederer, who had turned vegetarian after some gastric surgery. As explained in the classic poker book 'The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King', David Grey offered Lederer $10,000 to eat a cheeseburger. Despite the obvious problems to his gastric system, the money proved more appetising, and Lederer duly scoffed the burger, took the money (and probably suffered consequences too ugly to mention here!)
Another poker legend, Antonio ‘the Magician’ Esfandiari, famously bet $500,000 that he could go without any form of sexual release for an entire year. Oil and gas trader – and fellow high-stakes poker player Bill Perkins took Esfandiari up on his bet, not believing that ‘the Magician’ would manage such celibacy (including as it did masturbation!)
Esfandiari had been inspired by a Buddhist friend to ‘seek enlightenment’ through self-imposed sexual chastity – and lasted all of a week before ‘buying himself out’ of the preposterous bet.
After one week, I bought out of the bet,” he explained, though how much it cost him to do so is a secret. “I don’t want to say the sum, but it was an amount that hurt. I paid a pretty price.”
Often the other gambler pretty much has to allow this ‘buy out’ to make a profit, as Esfandiari explains:
If it would cost me $500,000 to have sex or masturbate, I would have stayed celibate.”
Not that having to buy out of such bets early has stopped Esfandiari from making other prop bets. Such is the fun -and money -that prop bets entails that it’s difficult for the high-stakes player to refuse such action.
And he also likes the intellectual side of it – though some might not see something like ‘swimming across the shark tank’ or ‘snorting lines of salt’ as having any intellectual integrity at all!
The way these things come up, everybody is usually completely new to the situation,” stated Esfandiari. “It’s interesting to see how people gather information on the fly and dissect that information.”
However, experiencing new and weird things is often at the heart of the Magician’s decision to accept prop bets.
He once attended a dinner party at the home of Dan Bilzerian-the ‘Instagram King’ and a poker pro - where his host demonstrated how a bullet-proof vest works by shooting at one lying on the floor.
Not enough for Esfandiari, as he explains:
I thought that was a waste. I decided that I wanted the max rush of experiencing it. So I put the vest on and let Dan shoot at me.”
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No money involved, nothing tangible to be gained, but as Esfandiari says:
Best Poker Player Prop Bets
I got my max rush. In that instance, the experience was worth more than any money I could have gotten for agreeing to be shot at.”
There is very little in the way of prop bets which hasn’t been done, and won or lost – and the ingenuity of some of the winners is legendary. ‘Titanic’ Thompson, a scratch golfer, once bet that he could drive a golf ball 500 yards – a seemingly impossible task – but when the bet was accepted he drove to a nearby frozen lake and – using the ice as an aid – easily accomplished the 500 yard distance.
With prop bets probably being as old as gambling itself, they have built up a legendary status which is unlikely to ever stop. As long as gamblers have the money, and the balls to wager it, then people are going to continue doing the craziest things – like Johnny Moss deciding to accept a 15-1 bet of a $1000 that he couldn’t beat up a huge, known tough-guy in the pub, a 100-0 record bar fight monster.
Top Poker Prop Bets
Despite cold-cocking the guy from behind, Moss ended up seriously battered and broken in hospital once the streetfighter had finished with him.
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According to Howard Lederer, the story goes that fellow poker-legend ‘Puggy’ Pearson turned up to visit Moss at the hospital and told him he was crazy, that he couldn't go on taking these kinds of bets.
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Moss, a true gambler, up for any proposition as long as the price was right, looked at Pearson and murmured:
Fifteen-to-one was too good to pass up. I had to take it.'