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. Howard Lederer is probably not the most popular man in the poker world, but he took place in one of the best poker prop bets a while ago. Lederer is known to be a vegetarian, but in this bet he was offered by David Grey the amount of $10,000 to eat one hamburger.

Prop bets (also known as proposition bets) are extremely popular in the poker world and come in all shapes and sizes. These, as you would expect to, include a proposition of some sorts and a bet. I can guarantee that you’ve probably made a proposition bet before and might not have even known it. Ever told your friend “I bet you $5 you can’t eat that whole pizza?’ That is the definition of a prop bet. You proposed that they could or could not do something and agreed to bet money on it.

Prop bets happen year round and sometimes are some of the funniest and strangest things in the world. I’ve seen prop bets about losing absurd amounts of weight, trying to run insane distances, and even one recently where a guy tried to eat $1000 in McDonalds in 36 hours.

Prop bets don’t always have to be silly in nature. A lot of times and especially around World Series of Poker time, these are more “normal” in nature. That is if there is anything normal about betting hundreds of thousands of dollars on whether or not someone can do something.

I want to introduce you to the most popular types of prop bets you see at the World Series of Poker (WSOP). While these won’t involve people eating absurd amounts of McDonalds, they still are for loads of money.

Last Longers

If you’ve ever played tournament poker before, there’s a decent chance you’ve made one of these bets or at least heard about people making these bets. This is a prop bet where two or more players put up money to see who lasts longer in the tournament. The last player standing after every other player in the bet is knocked out is the winner.

Last longers bets have nothing to do with whether or not you make the money in the tournament. If you have a last longer with one other player and they get knocked out first, and you get knocked out second, you still win the bet. The interesting part about big last longers is they can sometimes affect how someone plays certain hands. Imagine if you have a $10k last longer bet and you have a decision on the bubble of the tournament. If cashing in the tournament is only like $1k, you are probably going to opt to take the more passive route to try and win the last longer if your “opponent” in the bet is short stacked.

Personally, I don’t touch last longer bets for this reason. I don’t want there to be anything that might affect me making a decision that will affect whether or not I win the tournament. I would hate having to fold in a spot where I could potentially set myself up to win a tournament just to try and lock up a last longer bet.

Bracelet Bets

These bets are usually the biggest money bets of the summer, and they usually involve the big names and any young hotshot that’s crushing the game. Bracelet bets come in all shapes and sizes, but the formula is always the same. Can X player win X amount of bracelets or not? You probably think any bet like this is insane for the person betting to win the X amount of bracelets, but surprisingly it is possible. You have to remember that the WSOP has a ton of higher buy-in events that only get a couple hundred players. High stakes players have a strong chance to win a bracelet or multiple bracelets if they’re playing these smaller field tournaments.

Fantasy Draft Bets

These bets might not be classified as prop bets, but I still think they’re fitting to be mentioned here. Every year there is a $25k buy-in Fantasy Poker Player Draft that is held amongst anyone with the cash and desire to buy-in. The premise is simple. Players that are playing in the WSOP are drafted and put onto teams much like they would be in a season long fantasy football draft. Players receive points based on how well their picks do in the WSOP. The player with the most points at the end of the WSOP is the winner.

How to Get Involved in WSOP Prop Bets

Getting involved in WSOP prop bets is as simple as finding a friend to bet with. There aren’t really any official channels to get involved with prop bets. The only bets that you’re going to find at an established location are going to probably be on who is going to win the final table of the main event. These probably won’t be available this year, though, because those betting lines were set when they were still using the November Nine set up.

If you’re interested in the $25k draft, you’ll have to either know someone in the poker world that can connect you or you’ll have to seek out the person that is arranging it. For every other prop bet, that’s up to you and anyone willing to take your action. Just remember, though, if you do choose to make a bet this way that there are a lot of added risks that you’ll run into. There are A LOT of stories about WSOP prop bets that were won and not paid. Buyer beware especially if it’s for a lot of money.

Poker player Mike Noori’s bet to supersize himself on McDonald’s this weekend is part of a long tradition of outrageous prop bets. From Paul Ivey to Dan Bilzerian, Paul Phua picks out 10 favourites

Starting from today (Friday May 19), poker player Mike Noori has just 36 hours in which to eat $1,000 of McDonald’s food. Many people believe it cannot be done, estimating that he will need to consume about 70,000 calories – the recommended daily amount is less than 3,000! Others say it can: hundreds of thousands of dollars have by now been wagered on the outcome by poker players.
And why is Mike Noori putting his body through this ordeal? Because he was challenged to do so in a prop bet.
Some poker players will gamble on just about anything: whether it’s as small as what the next woman to enter the room will be wearing, or as big as eating several weeks’ worth of food in 36 hours! The most outrageous of these prop bets make great stories. Here are just ten of them, starting with some old-timers:

Titanic Thompson and the golf ball

Top Poker Prop Bets

Titanic Thompson, who hosted the very first World Series of Poker, is one of the most famous gamblers of all time. Sky Masterson, the hero of the musical Guys and Dolls, was based on him. He was no fool: when Titanic Thompson made a prop bet, he always had an angle. He would first secretly count all the watermelons in a truck and later wager, during a seemingly casual conversation with bystanders, that he could guess the exact number. Another time he bet he could throw a walnut over a building, having first secretly weighted it with lead. And when he bet he could drive a golf ball 500 yards, further than any golf pro had managed at that time, he found no shortage of takers for this seemingly impossible feat. But he simply waited till winter, then drove the ball, bouncing, over a frozen lake!

Amarillo Slim and the ping pong battle

Amarillo Slim was one of the great old-school poker players, who won the first of his four WSOP bracelets in 1972. He, too, would bet on almost anything. Perhaps his most famous prop bet was when he challenged Bobby Riggs, a former tennis champ, to a table tennis match. Slim’s one condition was that he could choose the paddles they used. He showed up with two frying pans, having secretly practised with them for months beforehand. He won the match. He successfully repeated the trick years later against a Taiwanese ping-pong champion, though this time his weapon of choice was Coca-Cola bottles!

Brian Zembic and his 38C breast implants

Best Poker Player Prop Bets

A magician and high-stakes gambler, Brian Zembic was famous for his bizarre prop bets: he lived in a box for a week and in a bathroom for another week. For another bet he slept the night in Central Park with $20,000 on his person. But one prop bet in particular made the headlines. In 1996, for a $100,000 bet, he agreed to have breast implants – 38C, to be precise – and keep them for a year. He even won the $4,500 cost of the operation from a cosmetic surgeon at backgammon. Not only did Zembic go through with it, he kept the implants for two decades. It was only last year that he appeared on the reality TV show, Botched, saying he had finally decided to have them removed.

Antonio Esfandiari and the lunges

What is it with magicians? Poker pro Antonio Esfandiari is also a former magician, and one of the most entertaining people you could share a card table with. His willingness to take a prop bet is legendary, though he often lives to regret it: he once swore off eating bread for a year, but cracked after a few minutes; a bet to remain celibate for a year was cancelled after nine days. But the prop bet that made the headlines, for all the wrong reasons, was one where for 48 hours he was not allowed to walk, only to lunge forward (going down on one knee then the other). It caused him so much pain that at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, rather than face going to the toilet, he made use of an empty water bottle at the table, and was promptly disqualified for “breach of tournament etiquette”. To Antonio Esfandiari’s credit, he offered up a sincere public apology for taking things too far, and donated his $50,000 winnings from the prop bet to charity.

Phil Ivey and the $150,000 steak

Best Poker Prop Bets Odds

Phil Ivey is another player who is never afraid to take a big bet. His golf course wagers with Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu are the stuff of legend, and he famously had a $5 million wager on whether he could win two WSOP bracelets in two years (despite his 10 bracelets overall, he only managed one bracelet in that period). But his craziest prop bet was when Tom Dwan challenged him to go vegetarian for a year. Phil Ivey stood to take down $1 million if he could swear off meat, something he had been thinking of doing anyway. But in the event, Phil Ivey said, he was too busy to work out how to eat healthily, and found eating pasta three times a day affected his poker. So he bought out of the bet after just nine days. The cost of that first juicy steak? $150,000…
Read part two of this Top 10, along with the eagerly awaited result of this weekend’s McDonald’s prop bet.