We’ve all been in that poker moment of needing to find a miraculous card on the river to preserve our tournament lives. It almost never happens, of course, and if it’s a two-outer (one of only two cards can turn the hand around and give you the winning hand), it’s easy to go into a very odd zone of visualising those cards.

That’s the situation the subject of this week’s classic World Series of Poker hand, Bryan Piccoli, found himself in three years ago in 2017. All-in with pocket eights against the ace-rag of Frenchman Antoine Saout, Piccoli knows that he is a favourite to double-up and bump his stack to almost 18 million chips with 12 people remaining in the World Series of Poker Main Event.

Poker being poker, however, Piccoli immediately falls behind Saout on the flop, where not one but two aces give Saout trips to Piccoli’s two-pair.

The expression on Antoine Saout’s face at this stage is either extremely narrative-driven or proof in the existence of a higher power, those oft-mentioned but never seen ‘Poker Gods’. As an aside, it’s surely one of the game’s most redeeming charms that while many religious types visualise a single, all-seeing Deity, poker players identify with a group of Gods, presumably sitting around playing cards. There’s a magic to that.