A poker story that quietly explains how one of the game’s most successful high-stakes cash game professionals got his start, and how a Bellagio legend nearly lost everything at the same table, resurfaced this week after Andrew Robl retold it live on a High Stakes Poker broadcast. The tale centers on Rick Salomon, a fixture of Las Vegas nosebleed games for two decades, and a single hand at Bobby’s Room that Salomon himself now credits, in a roundabout way, with sending him into rehab.
A Session That Started Like Any Other Night at Bobby’s Room
Bobby’s Room, tucked behind the main poker room at the Bellagio, has hosted some of the biggest cash games in the history of the sport since it opened in the 2000s. The room built its reputation on exactly the kind of session Robl described: a mixed-game lineup that starts at a manageable limit and balloons as egos, alcohol and competitive pride take over.
According to Robl’s retelling, the game in question began at a relatively tame $50/$100 with a $10,000 buy-in cap, the kind of structure that keeps a table accessible to strong regulars without immediately turning it into a nosebleed affair. Rick Salomon was in his usual seat, joined by Andrew Robl, Steve “Mr Smokey” Billirakis, Dan Bilzerian and a rotating cast of Bellagio regulars and touring professionals. Multi-day sessions were the norm in that era of Bobby’s Room, with players routinely returning to the same seats after a few hours of sleep to pick up exactly where the action left off.
The Rick Salomon Poker Hand That Changed Everything
By the third day of the session, the game had grown far beyond its starting stakes. Robl said roughly $500,000 was sitting on the table by that point, with Salomon straddling first to $5,000 and then pushing the blind straddle up to $10,000 a hand to keep the action moving. That kind of voluntary escalation is common in ego-driven high-stakes games, where a straddle functions as both a strategic tool and a statement that a player is not afraid of the stakes.
The pivotal hand arrived when Billirakis raised to $36,000 over Salomon’s straddle. Salomon defended with six-four offsuit, not a hand most players would want to see a five-figure raise with, but one that fit the loose, gambling texture of the game. The flop came down six-four-king, giving Salomon two pair. Under most circumstances that flop is a dream for the player who called with six-four. This time it was a trap. Billirakis was holding pocket kings, meaning the king on the flop gave him a set that crushed Salomon’s two pair. For anyone unfamiliar with how these hands stack up, our poker hand rankings guide lays out exactly why three of a kind beats two pair, and why a seemingly perfect flop can still be a disaster.
Salomon kept firing into a hand he could not win, and the pot spiraled into six figures before the money went in. It was, by Robl’s account, the moment the session turned from a big night into something closer to a career-defining collapse for Salomon and a career-launching windfall for Robl.
What the Loss Cost, and What It Started
The fallout extended well beyond that single hand. Robl said two other professionals at the table lost roughly $1.5 million combined during the session, while he personally doubled his net worth, a result he has pointed to before as the financial foundation that let him commit fully to poker rather than treating it as a side pursuit. For Salomon, the losses at Bobby’s Room that week became tangled up with a much harder period in his life.
“The progression of me going to rehab for a year started with blowing all the money in my Bellagio box,” Salomon said, reflecting on how the session’s losses fed into a stretch of his life that eventually led him to seek treatment. In the same conversation, he added a line that captured just how strange the arc of that story looks in hindsight: “If it wasn’t for him, I’d probably maybe still be on drugs.” Salomon has been open in the years since about how difficult that period was, and poker circles have long treated Bobby’s Room stories from that era as some of the wildest in the game’s modern history.
A Story Andrew Robl Still Tells
Robl has built a reputation as one of the most consistently successful high-stakes cash game players of his generation, a path that began with exactly this kind of session years before he became a recognizable name on livestreams like High Stakes Poker and Hustler Casino Live. That he chose to revisit the Salomon hand on a recent broadcast, rather than let it fade into Bobby’s Room lore, is part of why the clip spread quickly once PokerGO shared it. Old-school Bellagio stories rarely come with this much detail: exact stake sizes, a specific hand, and a direct line from a bad beat to a life-altering stretch for one of the players involved.
The story is also a reminder of how quickly stakes can escalate in unstructured cash games among players who know and trust each other. A $50/$100 game with a $10,000 cap is serious money for the vast majority of poker players, but it is still a controlled environment compared to what a multi-day session with voluntary straddles can turn into once players start pushing limits to keep the action interesting.
Why This Story Still Resonates
High-stakes poker has always produced these kinds of cautionary tales, and Salomon’s willingness to connect a specific hand to a genuinely difficult period of his life gives this one more weight than the usual “biggest pot I ever lost” story. It is also a useful reminder for recreational and semi-professional players alike that bankroll discipline and knowing when to walk away from an escalating game matter just as much as reading a board correctly. Poker remains a game of skill and variance, not a guaranteed path to wealth, and stories like this one illustrate why responsible bankroll management should always come before chasing the size of the pot in front of you. Players should always treat poker as entertainment first, gamble only what they can afford to lose, and seek support if a session or a stretch of results starts to feel like something bigger than the game itself.
For now, the hand lives on as one more chapter in Bobby’s Room’s long history, retold decades later by one of the players it helped make.
