Landon Tice Surrenders to Bill Perkins in Their Heads-Up Poker Match

Landon Tice called it quits less than 25% of the way into his heads-up poker match against Bill Perkins, as he determined victory was more improbable than anticipated.

The poker players planned to complete 20,000 hands at $200/$400 stakes on Americas Cardroom. Given that Perkins is an amateur, Tice agreed to pay back nine big blinds per 100 hands dealt as a handicap, which totaled $720,000 if the match were to go the distance.

But after June 29’s session, Tice gave serious thought to whether he should continue on or call it quits. On Sunday, he made the decision, which he shared on Twitter.

In their last session, Tice took a $28,000 loss over 337 hands, bringing his profit total down to $63,720 in 4,907 hands (just under 25% of the way through). Although he was ahead in profits, he was well behind the nine big blinds per 100 pace at just 3.25 BB/100.

Here’s the graph from Landon’s point of view for all the hands played in the challenge:

Prior to the match, Tice expressed confidence he could beat the handicap against a player he expected to be much weaker than he showed. Perkins took on some poker coaching for the match and performed at a much higher level than most anticipated.

By conceding, Tice isn’t required to pay the entire $720,000 to Perkins. Instead, as he wrote on Twitter, he owes a rebate of nine big blinds per 100 hands they played ($176,652), along with a $200,000 side bet, which comes out at around $312,932 in total. Perkins credited his poker coaches following the agreement with Tice.

Yesterday Landon also shared a heartfelt video on twitter, expressing all the mistakes he made prior and during the challenge with Perkins.