A $1.5 million game that ended up taking Rick Salomon to rehab – CodigoPoker

There are poker games that remain in memory because of the million-dollar pots. And there are others that transcend the tables because they end up changing the lives of those who play them. For Rick Salomon

The story was recalled by Andrew Robl

From $10,000 to half a million on the table

The game started as a $50/$100 cash game with a maximum buy-in of $10,000. Among the players were some professionals and regulars at the Bellagio, including Dan Bilzerian

Steve Mr Smokey Billirakis

Salomon started dominating the game. The problem appeared when he decided to keep playing through the night. “This was when Rick was using a lot of drugs, so he didn’t need to sleep,” Robl recalled.

As the hours passed, the action got out of control. By the third day, all players had around $500,000 on the table, even though the game had started with a maximum of $10,000.

Salomon also played extremely aggressively and began making $5,000 straddles on practically every hand. After losing a significant amount, he returned to the table with “a pillowcase full of cash,” Robl recalled, and raised his straddles to $10,000 per hand.

But the money was not enough to change his luck.

The hand that ended up changing his life

The outcome came with a hand that Salomon himself described as “so unpleasant” that it ended up being decisive in his decision to enter rehab.

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Billirakis raised to $36,000 over Salomon’s straddle, who defended with 6-4 offsuit. The flop was 6-4-K, a perfect combination for Salomon, who had hit two pair. The problem was that Billirakis had K-K and had flopped a set.

Rick Salomon with Pamela Anderson.

The hand ended in the worst way for Salomon and, according to him years later, that situation was one of the turning points of his life. “The progression to me going to rehab for a year started after losing all the money I had in my Bellagio box,” Salomon explained.

And then he left an even stronger statement about Billirakis: “He changed my life. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably still be using drugs.”

The brutal session also had consequences for other players. Robl said two professionals lost practically their entire bankroll, around $1.5 million each. He, on the other hand, came out on the other side of the story with a much larger fortune. “I doubled my net worth, and that’s what got me going,” he recalled.

The curiosity is that many years later Salomon sat down again at High Stakes Poker. During the last three sessions of the recent livestream, the millionaire ended up in the red again and accumulated losses of more than $2.2 million.

A story that shows that in high-stakes poker a single hand can change a life. For Salomon, that hand against Billirakis not only meant losing a huge pot: it ended up marking the beginning of a new stage.

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