Garrett Adelstein is about to do something he has never done before: play livestreamed poker outside of Southern California or Las Vegas.
The high-stakes cash game icon will appear on Poker at the Lodge this week, sitting down at Doug Polk's card room in Round Rock, Texas, for what amounts to the most anticipated livestream return in recent poker memory. Adelstein confirmed on X that he'll play Wednesday and Thursday, with stakes starting at $50/$100 and jumping to $100/$200 on Day 2. He'll face Polk and Sam "Senor Tilt" Kiki, among others. Alan Keating was initially floated for the lineup, but Polk clarified that Keating won't be in the game.
For a player who has logged over 600 hours of tracked livestream play across Live at the Bike, Hustler Casino Live, and various PokerGO productions, every single one of those sessions took place within driving distance of his SoCal home base. Texas is uncharted territory.
Why This Matters Beyond the Obvious
The timing here is loaded. The Lodge Card Club reopens May 26 after a bruising 11-week shutdown. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission raided the room on March 10, seizing over $1.3 million in cash and investigating allegations of money laundering, organized crime, and illegal gambling. Co-owners Polk, Jake Abdalla, and Jason Levin faced the possibility of felony charges. Staff were laid off. Player accounts were frozen.
Then, on April 28, a Williamson County Grand Jury voted against indictment, clearing the path for The Lodge to reclaim its seized assets and reopen. The room set its grand reopening for May 26, landing on the same day the 2026 World Series of Poker kicks off in Las Vegas.
Poker at the Lodge, the room's YouTube stream with nearly 240,000 subscribers and a 2024 Global Poker Award to its name, returns alongside the card room itself. Booking Adelstein for the comeback stream is a statement.
The Long Absence
Adelstein hasn't played a hand of poker in roughly a year. He says so himself, plainly. His last tracked sessions came during Season 7 of No Gamble, No Future on PokerGO last fall, where he competed in six episodes and dropped over $200,000 across three of them. He remains up nearly $2 million in lifetime tracked livestream and televised results, according to HighRollPoker.com, but that NGNF run was rough enough to cool whatever momentum he'd rebuilt.
And rebuilding has been slow. The September 2022 Jack-Four hand against Robbi Jade Lew, when Lew called his all-in shove with jack-high on the turn in a $270,000 pot, effectively ended his run as the consensus best player on Hustler Casino Live. Adelstein accused Lew of cheating. HCL's third-party investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. HCL banned him from the show. He disappeared.
"After the firestorm around the J4 hand, I just wasn't excited to play poker," Adelstein said in an interview last October. "And for the last decade, I've stuck with a rule that's worked well for me: if I'm not feeling it, I'm probably not going to play my best anyway, so it's fine to pass."
He resurfaced in December 2023 for a Bally's stream and a WPT show in Vegas, ran hot in both, and figured he'd start playing more. Then the motivation faded again. Another year off. A Bally's appearance in LA in December 2024 where he ran well. Then the NGNF disaster. Then nothing.
Life filled the gaps. Adelstein welcomed his second child in early 2025. Family, he says, has reshuffled his priorities. "Life happened," he told poker media. "My wife was four months pregnant when the J4 hand went down, and I've been swamped with other projects since."
The Book, the Grudge, and the Underground
One of those projects is Beneath the Cards, a memoir scheduled for September 1, 2026 release. Adelstein has been active on social media promoting the book, which he describes as both a personal account and a presentation of new evidence that Lew, along with associates Rip and Bryan, were part of an operation that cheated him and others on HCL.
He has also recently taken aim at Hustler Casino Live's handling of the entire scandal, making clear that he views the show's response as inadequate at best.
The book apparently goes beyond the J4 hand. Adelstein has shared stories about being cheated in underground games, including a rigged home game in 2012 where a mechanic dealer stacked the deck and he lost a $300,000-plus pot with the second nut flush on an unpaired board. He says he eventually got the crew to admit to cheating and was reimbursed. A second home game experience went badly too, with players allegedly being "negative freerolled from the jump."
His distrust of the underground scene isn't academic. He has connected dots between his own experiences and the recent federal indictments against former NBA players Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones in an LA home game cheating ring, noting he played against Curtis Meeks (named in the indictment) on a Bally's stream in December 2023, and that former HCL regular "Mars" allegedly conspired with a mechanic dealer also named in the case.
What to Watch For
Adelstein at The Lodge is interesting on multiple levels. He's playing in a room he's never set foot in, against a lineup built around Polk (who knows Adelstein's game as well as anyone from their podcast conversations and shared poker circles) and Kiki, who has become a fixture in high-stakes televised games. The stakes aren't nosebleed by Adelstein's standards, but $100/$200 with this cast is going to play big.
There's also the game-integrity angle. Adelstein has been vocal about wanting to play on streams that use what he calls a "nearly trustless system" where real-time hole cards aren't visible to anyone, including ownership. The Lodge's production has adopted these kinds of protections, which may be part of why Adelstein is comfortable making this his comeback venue rather than returning to the LA scene that burned him.
For a player who built his legend at the Commerce Casino and the Hustler, traveling to a Texas card room that just survived a state raid to play on a stream that's been dark for two and a half months is about as far from the comfort zone as it gets. That's exactly what makes it worth watching.
Poker at the Lodge returns to YouTube this week. Adelstein plays Wednesday and Thursday.
