If you’ve ever played the World Series of Poker Main Event, then you’ll know that it’s an event like no other. The standard is incredible, with a mixture of both some of the best poker players who have ever lived and some of the worst ever to do so too. It’s therefore a tournament like no other, and as such, things happen at the WSOP felt that don’t happen anywhere else.

Two years ago, on the approach to the WSOP Main Event final table, such a hand occurred.

It’s worth going into exactly what it takes to get to the stage that the three men involved in the hand are at. If you’ve reached the bubble for the final table, then you’ve played your absolute A-Game for almost an entire week, probably starting at 12 noon and finishing 12 hours later, mentally and physically drained.

In the process, you’ll have seen an average of 30 hands an hour for 12 hours across six days. That’s over 2,000 hands of poker, during which time you will have been dealt pocket aces (or indeed any other specific paired hand) once every 221 deals. So, you’ve probably had the ‘pocket rockets’ around ten times by this point.