Sami Kelopuro Goes on Heater; Wins $1.3 Million

Every poker player worth their salt dreams of going on a massive heater and winning unimaginable sums of money. Finland’s Sami Kelopuro is in the middle of a purple patch where he can seemingly do no wrong. These heaters do not happen often, but when they do, especially to elite players, they can be devastating.

Kelopuro is better-known as “LarsLuzak” in online poker circles. The Finnish star has been a regular feature in online high stakes cash games for more than a decade, often found playing up to $500/$1,000 games at Full Tilt Poker. Those games created some of the largest cash game pots of all time. Those days are long gone, but Kelopuro is still a force to be reckoned every time he sits at a table.

August has been kind to Kelopuro; that is the understatement of the year. Readers are fixated on a blog Kelopuro started writing on a Finnish website a couple of weeks ago. This blog highlights the highs and lows of a high stake poker player. There have been many more peaks than troughs during the eighth month of the year.

Kelopuro running hot during POWERFEST

The partypoker POWERFEST is where everything started to turn to gold for Kelopuro. POWERFEST is partypoker’s flagship tournament series with this latest edition featuring $28 million worth of guaranteed prize pools. Partypoker recently enforced an alias change for its entire customer base and “ChimneyBarrel” was the nickname Kelopuro chose.

A second-place finish in a $5,200 pot-limit Omaha event netted the star $78,000 on August 1st. He won another $125,000 for a third-place finish in a $10,300 no-limit hold’em tournament, helping him onto $235,000 profit for the day. The best, however, was yet to come.

$100/$200 tables are some of the highest stakes available online at partypoker and Kelopuro sat at one of them. He did not expect to get much action at his heads-up PLO table, but a player unknown to him sat down and began playing.

Kelopuro quickly lost $85,000, yet felt good about his chances of winning because his opponent was playing extremely loose. The Finnish superstar explained his opponent was three and four-betting almost 100 percent of pots, with five and six-bets not looking out of place. This anonymous player was the epitome of a lunatic and Kelopuro was about to take full advantage.

Game swings in Kelopuro’s favor

A massive pot of $227,000 put the ball firmly in our hero’s court. An aces versus kings hand saw all the chips go into the middle preflop with the best hand remaining so after the board ran out. This gifted Kelopuro a $424,000 stack and left his opponent needing to reload with $20,000. And reload he did, dozens of times. The unknown player began moving all in preflop with any four cards and Kelopuro kept calling.

All good things must come to an end and the anon player eventually quit. He had lost 65 buy-ins and when the dust had settled, Kelopuro’s stack read $1,403,932.15. Nobody knows who the mystery player was, although Kelopuro states he has a good idea but is keeping his identity secret.

The run good continued two days later when Kelopuro swapped cash games for tournaments. He entered several online poker tournaments and finished with more than $200,000 profit for $1,525,000 profit for the week, his best-ever tally.

Five wins and three runner-up finishes

More tournament action followed on August 11th. Kelopuro entered five $5,200 buy-in tournaments, three $10,300 and a $25,500. Amazingly, he won five of those tournaments and finished second in three of them for $400,000 profit. Kelopuro now has $2.5 million worth of profit through the first eight months of 2019.

That impressive figure is sure to rise over the coming month with the PokerStars World Championship Of Online Poker running. WCOOP has $75 million guaranteed, while sites on the GG Network are hosting a $50 million series. 888Poker has its XL Eclipse series and partypoker is set to run a $30 million KO Series. It is difficult to imagine Kelopuro not winning at least one title across these festivals.

The Helsinki-based pro stays away from the live poker tournament world, which is surprising given his talent. He has $1,151,942 in winnings, with his largest cash being worth $503,173. That was his reward for a second-place finish in a $10,000 PLO Championship event at the 2011 WSOP. He hasn’t, however, cashed in a live event since August 8th, 2012.

Matthew Pitt

If it’s something you can play online for real money, chances are Matthew knows a bit about it. He’s been writing about slots, craps and poker for the better part of the last decade. He’s written for PokerNews, PartyPoker and many other respected online gambling websites during the last nine years.

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