Landon Tice has his work cut out for him after consecutive losing sessions to Bill Perkins in a high-stakes online poker heads-up contest. The 22-year-old poker pro is technically trailing in the match following Tuesday’s session, despite having turned an overall profit.
Prior to the start of the match, both players agreed that Tice would pay Perkins back the equivalent to nine big blinds per 100 hands played. At $200/$400 stakes over 20,000 hands, our trusty calculator computes that out to $720,000, assuming they complete the entire match.
That means if Perkins gets walloped by $700,000, equal to 7.5 buy-ins ($40,000 each), he’d still win due to the handicap in play. Heading into last Friday’s session, Tice was in solid shape, up $144,255 over 4,222 hands, which comes out to 8.54 big blinds. Not quite enough to win the challenge, but just barely off the pace.
Since then, however, the match has turned upside down for the young poker pro. On Friday, he suffered one of his worst defeats of the challenge through 11 sessions, dumping $51,990 to the hedge fund manager over 348 hands. That set him back in his quest to get to nine big blinds per 100 hands of profit over 20,000 hands.
Suffering another defeat
Tuesday’s session — Day 12 — set him back even further. He lost $28,000 over 337 hands and is now up just $63,720, barely more than 1.5 buy-ins. Tice and Perkins have completed 4,907 hands, roughly 24.5% of the entire heads-up No-Limit Hold’em challenge. That comes out to a profit of just 3.25 big blinds per 100 hands for the young poker player, putting him far off the needed pace.
For Tice to win this challenge, he must get to a $720,000.01 profit or better by the time 20,000 hands approaches. Hitting that goal is possible, although it won’t be easy. He must win a total of $656,279.61 over the final 15,093 hands, which calculates out to about 10.9 big blinds per 100 hands.
According to PokerShares, Tice is still favored (-123) to win the match straight-up, without the handicap factored in. Perkins remains the underdog at +115. Those odds have been on the decline in recent days due to Perkins performing at a higher level than most anticipated before the challenge began.
The heads-up competitors will get back to the virtual felt on the Americas Cardroom poker site on Wednesday afternoon. As always, you can catch the action on the ACR Twitch channel.
