Audio By Carbonatix
Doug Polk is, unquestionably, one of the best poker players in the world over the past few years, a true heads-up specialist, and he has over $10.5 million in live poker tournament earnings including winning $3.686 million and a gold bracelet at the 2017 World Series of Poker in event #6. Polk also has a wildly successful poker YouTube channel with 429K subscribers and he is a co-owner of The Lodge Card Club in Austin, Texas which is often lauded as the best poker room in the country.
Something Doug Polk has never done, until now, is stand-up comedy. But a little while back he met Tony Hinchcliffe who runs the Kill Tony comedy podcast. Hinchcliffe was feeling confident after people started telling him ‘the best heads-up poker player in the world’ was at this party and challenged Doug Polk to a $10K heads-up match. Tony won the first match but Doug came roaring back and won his money back and then some, including a spot on the Kill Tony live comedy show.
When Doug Polk first dropped a clip of him doing comedy he says he got torn apart in the comments. Polk shared screenshots of comments saying “RIP, this dude needs a lot of work” and “this will go poorly.” And this:
Reddit / Doug Polk
But once he made it to the Kill Tony show Doug Polk put together a minute-long set of jokes that impressed the judge panel and Tony Hinchcliffe himself said it was probably the best set they saw all night.
Tony Hinchcliffe did admit that he and Doug Polk have become friends since first meeting and playing the heads-up matches where Polk “paid” $40K for a spot on the Kill Tony live show, which is how some people have characterized it. Having a professional stand-up comic in your corner coaching you before coming on the show has to help for something, right?
Later in the appearance, Doug Polk did joke about losing $1 million playing online poker in a single weekend and thought he was having the worst weekend of anyone in the vicinity until, as he found out, one of the members of the Glee cast had taken their own life at the hotel he was staying at. That feels like the kind of joke that plays well for that particular crowd but that could get you in trouble in a lot of places…
What did you think of Doug Polk’s first crack at stand-up? A natural because he’s used to being on camera for live poker events? Needs to work on his delivery? Let us know in the Facebook comments!
Content shared from brobible.com.