Any cash game player would have a hard time getting up from a table where they have literally stumbled upon a gold mine. However, only a handful manage to run the kind of insane marathon that three WSOP bracelet winner Chance Kornuth shared on his Twitter account. Kornuth's session of a lifetime took place in 2010, when poker was, in his words, a completely different game than it is today. In his first private cash game, he turned an initial buy-in of $5,000 into a whopping $517,000 in a just 69 hours!
13 years ago, I took a trip down to Dallas to play a private PLO cash game.
— Chance Kornuth (@ChancesCards) April 17, 2023
Little did I know, I would end up playing for 69 hours straight, eat 15 McGriddles breakfast sandwiches and end up +$517K from the session.
Here's the story of the 69 hour session 👇
In the post, he described a PLO game with "low" blinds of $25/$50, but it quickly took off. Kornuth saw his chance for the big stack the moment three all-ins fell on the very first orbit, and the businessmen didn't hesitate to reload their stacks with stacks of folded $10,000 bills as if they were playing for $200. "After about 6 hours, the stacks started to get deeper, so I secretly took a few add-ons so the players wouldn't realize I wanted to cover them. My total buy-in and stack were now $20,000. People started losing sports bets or getting stuck in and the stacks really started to fly!"
After just 12 hours of the session, Kornuth already had a hundred thousand dollars. His run was interrupted by a bold docked bluff that cost him the full twenty thousand. Kornuth took a short break after that loss and ran out for some air to reset his head, which immediately brought him back into the game. "I came back feeling fantastic and went into probably the biggest heatrun of my life. The next 24 hours are a blur - I drank at least 20 cups of coffee, ate 5 McDonald's McGriddles and picked up a lot of big sweats."
After a full day of grinding, Kornuth had amassed a staggering $200,000, and he didn't know there was even more to come. The 24-year-old American was almost falling asleep, but even that didn't make him abandon such a good game. The session rolled into the next day, where Kornuth, fueled by energy drinks and sandwiches from McDonald's, continued his winning ways. He dealt the final blow with a miraculous one-outer, and that had already angered the sitting businessman. The session was over, and Kornuth walked away from his first private cash game a full half-million richer.
"After 69 hours of PLO uninterrupted, with zero sleep, getting in nothing but $1.99 sandwiches and heavily caffeinated beverages, the room was moving like a small ship. In the end, I cashed in $517,000. To this day, it's my biggest cash game win and I'll never forget that '69-hour session'."
While this session may seem unbelievable to many, the fact is that some have managed to almost double it: in November 2021, Zach Gensler broke the Guinness World Record for the longest cash game session in history by playing 124 hours straight. Gensler, a painter from Moorhead, Missouri, had been preparing for this attempt for years, and even completed an 80-hour training session at the Aria Hotel in 2019. In doing so, Gensler broke Phil "The Unabomber" Laak's previous record. In June 2010, Laak played continuously for 115 hours at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. He took a four-minute break every hour to stretch, sharpen his mind and go to the restroom or shower.
Source: HighStakesDB, VIP-grinders, CardPlayer