Esfandiari spent almost all of Sunday competing in the 2016 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event, a $5,000 buy-in tournament that will pay the winner more than $800,000. With 90 minutes left to play before the event would finish for the night, tournament officials took a 30-minute break to allow the staff, TV crew, and players to grab a quick bite to eat and go to the bathroom.
There was only one problem.
Esfandiari couldn't move.
He would recall later, "I literally couldn't make it to the bathroom. I couldn't walk."
This is where everything fell apart.
At some point during the course of 48 hours of lunging, Esfandiari's judgment waned. A man known for making some of the best calls in poker made one of the most startling decisions anyone had every heard.
With his father blocking one side of him and another friend shielding the other side, Esfandiari covered himself with a towel from the hotel room and relieved himself into a receptacle hidden under the table. Some people said it was a bottle. Esfandiari called it a bucket. It didn't matter what it was.
The man urinated. Into a receptacle. In public.
For those who don't know poker, consider some other star of a game--an Aaron Rodgers, Kobe Bryant, or Lionel Messi--making the decision to let it fly on the field of play. It's like that, but, in a way, worse, because Esfandiari wasn't doing it for the good of the team or to win a championship for the home crowd. He was doing it to cash a bet.
It's unclear at this point who turned Esfandiari in to tournament officials, but it doesn't matter. It's not like he could really keep it a secret. Some people said they could still (and there's no polite way to put it) smell it in the air when he returned to the table.