Garrett Adelstein Breaks Down His $390K Payback Hand Against Dylan Gang
By Duncan Smith · Online Cash Game Pro
Some poker hands become memorable because of the money. Others stick around because of the players involved, the table dynamic, and whatever history happens to be sitting underneath the surface.
This one has all of that.
In February 2022, Garrett Adelstein and Dylan Gang played one of the more famous back-to-back storylines in Hustler Casino Live history. One week, Dylan slowrolled Garrett in a $186,000 pot. The next week, Garrett stacked him in a pot worth nearly $400,000.
Garrett sums up the setup perfectly in his new hand breakdown:
“I didn’t respond to the slow roll, but I also didn’t forget it.”
That is the obvious hook, but the video is not just Garrett taking a victory lap. As Garrett says, “This isn’t another short. This is a free street-by-street hand breakdown for my upcoming Upswing course.”
That is what makes the hand worth revisiting. There is drama, there is history, and there is a massive pot, but underneath all of that is a useful look at how a great live cash game player turns a specific read into a profitable exploit.
There is an entire chapter on this hand in Garrett’s upcoming book, Beneath the Cards.
The Setup
The game is $100/$200/$400 with a $200 ante, and the players are about $194,000 deep effectively.
Garrett opens the Button to $1,200 with Tc 9c. Dylan is in the second blind and 3-bets to $6,500. The third blind folds, and Garrett calls.
So far, nothing especially unusual has happened. Tc 9c is a mandatory defend in position, especially this deep. It plays well, makes strong disguised hands, and gives Garrett plenty of room to navigate after the flop.
But Garrett’s call is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what he thought Dylan’s range looked like.
Garrett believed Dylan was 3-betting too many hands from this configuration. With the ante in play and a recreational player still behind him, Garrett thought Dylan should be doing a lot more calling with hands like suited aces, suited broadways, suited connectors, and some offsuit broadways. On top of that, they are incredibly deep, so Dylan is going to put himself in bad postflop situations unnecessarily very often when he bloats the pot out of position.
Garrett’s read was that Dylan was pushing too many of those marginal hands into his 3-betting range.
That matters because a preflop mistake rarely stays preflop. If Dylan’s range is built incorrectly, Garrett gets to defend wider and attack certain textures more aggressively than he could against a cleaner, more balanced 3-betting range.
Poker players tend to talk about exploits in vague terms. Someone is too loose. Someone is too sticky. Someone is too aggressive. Garrett does something more precise here. He identifies the range construction error, thinks through how that affects the rest of the hand, and then makes a play that looks strange in theory but makes sense against the actual person sitting across from him.
The Flop
The flop comes 9d 6h 2d.
Dylan bets $4,500, around 30% pot. Garrett has top pair with a weak kicker, and raises big to $25,000.
Garrett calls it “a very unorthodox play,” and he is right. Top pair with a weak kicker is not usually the hand players reach for when building a large flop-raising range in a deep-stacked 3-bet pot.
Garrett explains that if he were going to raise a 9x hand in theory, other hands make more sense. A9 is stronger because it has the nut kicker. 98 and 97 need more protection and pick up more backdoor straight equity. On paper, Tc 9c might be one of the worst candidates to pick for this flop raise.
But Garrett had a reason.
He says Dylan “fit the mold of a guy who really underfolded,” especially against Garrett himself. In other words, he expected Dylan to continue too wide against bets and raises, and he believed the history between them mattered. After the previous session, Dylan was probably not looking for reasons to fold against him.
So Garrett raises.
As Garrett puts it: “I was well aware that I was making a huge exploit here by going ahead and raising this flop.”
The play looks strange in a vacuum, but it makes much more sense when you view it through Garrett’s read. If Dylan is going to continue with too many worse hands, Garrett can raise thinner for value than he normally could. He does not need Tc 9c to be a great theoretical raise, he just needs Dylan’s actual continuing range to be too wide.
And Dylan does exactly what Garrett wants: he calls with Ah 4h.
That is a huge win for the exploit. Against a big raise, Ah 4h is in rough shape. It has some backdoor potential, but not enough to comfortably continue for that sizing, especially with stacks this deep.
The money goes in later, but the exploit starts here.
The Turn
The turn is the Th.
Garrett improves to top two pair, and Dylan picks up the nut flush draw.
Dylan checks. Garrett bets $35,000, about 65% pot. Dylan shoves for around $168,000. Garrett calls.
Once Garrett turns two pair, he wants to fast-play. The board is dynamic, stacks are deep, and plenty of river cards can change the value of both players’ hands. As Garrett says, “Whenever you have that kind of set of circumstances, we generally don’t need to do too much slow playing.”
That is a good lesson on its own. Players love to get tricky in big pots, but when you have a strong but vulnerable hand against a splashy player who can have plenty of pair-plus-draw and combo-draw hands, the goal is to get money into the pot before the board changes.
Garrett’s sizing is also interesting. He says he could have used something closer to 80% pot, but chose 65% partly for metagame reasons. That size set up a pot-sized river shove, which mirrored a prior hand against Dylan where Garrett had bluffed with KQ against Dylan’s J3.
Garrett does not claim to know exactly what Dylan is thinking. He just knows the detail might matter. If there is a chance the size looks familiar, or nudges Dylan toward the wrong conclusion, Garrett is happy to take it.
Dylan shoves.
Garrett says the call with Tc 9c is “obviously a snap,” but he still takes the free live information. He talks, watches Dylan, and gathers what he can before putting in the chips.
The river is the 2s, and Garrett wins the $390,000 pot.
The Real Lesson
The fun version of this hand is simple. Dylan slowrolled Garrett. Garrett studied him. Garrett stacked him the next week. The table exploded. The clip aged beautifully.
Garrett even says, “This was sort of the revenge for that.”
But the real value of the video is not the payback. It is the explanation.
At the end of the breakdown, Garrett says, “The crux of the hand is my big flop raise with top pair, weak kicker.”
That is the right place to focus. Most people watching live probably remember the turn shove, the call, the runout, and the reaction afterward. Garrett brings the attention back to the decision that actually mattered most.
The flop raise is where the exploit happens.
He had a read from tape review, inspired by a desire to figure Dylan out. He understood how that read changed Dylan’s continuing range. He chose a line that would be far too thin against a balanced opponent, then trusted the read in a massive pot.
That is one of the biggest differences between studying theory and playing high-stakes live poker well. Theory gives you the baseline, but the money often comes from knowing when the opponent has given you permission to leave that baseline behind.
That is also why this hand works so well as a preview of Garrett’s upcoming Upswing Poker course.
Garrett is not just showing famous hands and telling stories from the biggest games. He is explaining why he chose a line, what he expected his opponent to do wrong, and how the table dynamic shaped the decision.
If you want high-level live cash game analysis from one of the best to ever play that format, Garrett’s YouTube channel is a good place to start.
And if this hand is any indication, his upcoming Upswing course should give players a very practical look at how he thinks through high-stakes live cash game spots in real time.
