Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies Loses Record Pot

By all accounts, the high stakes cash games in the casinos in and around this years WSOP have seen record amounts wagered and regularly producing seven figure pots.
Doyle Brunson, with over fifty years experience in the high stakes action games, said: “The poker games are out of control at the Bellagio. I’ve never seen games where so much money is won and lost each night. The main players in the big game are from Finland. Great action guys, fun to play with. I’m sure you can figure out who they are,”
Patrik Antonius and Ilari Sahamies are both Finnish players who regularly play at the highest stakes available, such as the $2,000/$4,000 PLO, and a report from Ilari’s website, coinflip.com says Ilari Sahamies won a $1.7 million pot, but on Monday he lost a $2.4 million pot at a casino, which is possibly the largest pot in a casino cash game history. Ilari also mentions on his blog that he had lost $3.5 million in Chinese Poker during his stay in Vegas. Chinese poker is known to be a particularly volatile game and Doyle Brunson said he had experienced a $2.1 million downswing in just one hour.
However, playing high stakes and experiencing large swings is part of the course for Sahamies who is one of the most aggressive pot limit Omaha players in the world and is found regularly online playing at Full Tilt Poker’s  $200/$400 levels. He is often known to battle it out on a full table or heads up against such players as Phil Ivey and David Benymine.
Samahies represent a young and fearless breed of player which Finland seems to produce and he sums up his approach quite succinctly when he said: “Playing it safe will never get you to the top. More important is that you have the balls to bet at the right time. If you want to succeed you need to have a gamblers attitude”.