Behind the Swings: The Legend of Isildur1

[Music] When 'Isildur1' first began crushing  online heads-up games in 2009 No one knew whether he 'd  be an overnight sensation or a true poker star in the making. We are very proud and excited to unveil his true identity. Coming in from the very back of the room... [Music] It was 2014 I was living in Vancouver. Late in my day, he decided to sit down at the $300/$600 PLO table with me. Looking back I played pretty poorly. He really dominated me pot after pot went his way. I just ended up in so

many big pots where I called a 3-bet, called a c-bet and folded the turn and those added up fast. When all was said and done, I lost $1.1 million that day. I don't think anybody has ever won as much money online as fast as Viktor has, but he also could lose it pretty quickly. Back in the day, there were maybe 20-25 regulars who played $200/$400+ online and so when somebody new showed up that nobody had heard of and nobody had even  seen at $50/$100 or $100/$200. Obviously everybody talked about

and tried to figure out who is this person and how good are they. [Music] The first time I heard about the  legend that turned out to be Isildur1. It was just some kid on euros  sites that I didn't play. Who apparently had climbed  the ranks really quickly and was just battling play at the highest  stakes against the best players out of nowhere. Then Isildur1 showed up on Full  Tilt playing the highest stakes. And that's when all the other players  who knew each other started talking. He's playi

ng very aggressive. He wants to play deep. He's forcing you to make very  big decisions all the time. And he's very talented I think,  from the day one we played. We would see him play against other people and play an aggressive style that we hadn't really seen before. It just seemed like there was a big pot again and again and again. Much more often than you'd normally see in these matches and I had a couple of friends who played with him a couple times and everybody was kind of debating and wo

ndering: Is this guy good? Or is this guy bad? Because he certainly was playing a new style. And you know back then we didn't have solvers. So anytime somebody came out with a new strategy, you had to ask yourself. Okay, well. We think our strategy is right. Like kind of the generally approved  consensus of maybe we're 3-betting 10% and we're c-betting 80% and we have all  these kind of like rough guidelines. We're using these bet sizings and when somebody shows up and does something much differ

ent, you don't really have proof that they're wrong. [Music] The most common opinion was  that this guy was not good. But he was really high variance, kind of scary to play against. At the time I was more of a  $100/$200, $200/$400 regular and so when he was out here  battling $200/$400 and $300/$600, I was not one of the first  ones to battle against him. I was taking shots at $200/$400  and maybe occasionally $300/$600 when the 6-handed games were really good. So I got to sit back and watch hi

m play against other people. It went from, him sitting with whoever was there, to him sitting at two tables with Patrik Antonius, two tables with Phil Ivey, two tables with Tom Dwan, all at the same time. And it was just kind of lunacy. I just thought this guy is going to go broke. I thought he wouldn't stick around  long enough for me to play against him. As I thought he would just  be out of a bankroll so fast but he didn't go broke. He actually won millions. So he's not only battling all the

best  players at the highest stakes at the same time but he was winning. It was like the trajectory, that was rumored on these euro sites just  continued once he moved over to Full Tilt. We know Phil Ivey, we know Patrik Antonius, we know Tom Dwan. We know these guys are great and this new kid he just can't be crushing them, right? He just can't be. Sentiment slowly shifted amongst  the high stakes community from okay this guy's a maniac  that somehow got all this money and is going to lose it t

o okay this guy knows something and he might know something we don't. At that time game selection, we knew about it but it wasn't  treated the same way that it is today and I would be careful about making sure  I was playing in at least okay games when I was playing too high  for my bankroll frankly but when I was playing at my comfortable stakes I would just play whoever. After a time I build my bankroll and I moved up to where the stakes that Isildur was playing regularly were the stakes that

I was playing regularly and then of course we crossed paths. The first time I played Isildur1, it was a little bit scary. It felt like he was running me over. It felt like he was bluffing all the time and willing to go all in bluffing  a lot more than other opponents. So I started making looser call  downs than I otherwise would and sometimes he was bluffing sometimes he wasn't. At first I didn't really get how he was managing to be so aggressive but seemingly relatively balanced. [Music] Whenev

er you're playing somebody  who puts a lot of chips into the pot your human brain starts to think, well, when I make a hand against this guy I'm getting a stack. So there's an element of, like the gamblers mentality, where against this person you're going to get paid off. So it's exciting to play against a person like this, it can be scary but it's also exciting. When you play against a nit, it's not so exciting you grind it out. But against someone like Isildur, you think you're going to win a 

big pot when you make your hand. So I did like playing him, I liked trying and one thing I noticed, that took me a little while to notice is that he wasn't just some maniac. He was really really smart. I like to play a style, where especially at that time, I was very tuned into what had happened recently. We talk about game flow. Recently he's check raised three flops, so right now if he has a big hand, he's definitely going to check raise again. He's not going to slow play, because he thinks t

hat I think he's check raising too much and so on and so forth. Against almost everybody that I played at this particular game. I was a step ahead and I would usually out guess them  when it came to the leveling wars, but with Isildur it wasn't going that way and after time when I was wrong and wrong again and wrong again and right once  and then wrong three more times. It dawned on me that, No he's doing the same thing I'm doing but he's doing it better. When you were playing at 6-max tables wi

th Isildur it was a little bit less intimidating, it was a little bit less fast-paced because you had breaks. He wasn't playing every pot, you were playing pots with other people. You could could play a little bit tighter and sneak by without just being  forced into huge pot after huge pot. But when you were playing him heads up, you had to play big pots and not only that, when you play against Isildur1 heads up, the action is always on you. My most memorable session, not just against Isildur bu

t against anybody, was an online session in 2009. I was in my apartment in New York. We started about 7:00 p.m. which was midnight for him by the way. At $200/$400 PLO, this was not one of those swingy  sessions that went back and forth. I pretty quickly started winning and after  being up around $400,000 (10 buy-ins). He wanted to move up. And so we moved up to $300/$600 and at $300/$600 I continued to win, till we moved up to $500/$1,000. We ended our session around 5:00 a.m. my time. The sun

was not out yet, but soon would be and I had won $1.6 million. Biggest session I've ever had to this day. Most of the times when you think of 7-figure scores in poker, you're winning a tournament, you're at a final table, there are cameras on you, your friends are in the crowd cheering you on and you hold up a trophy or a bracelet  and they take pictures of you. But when you do it online, you just close the lobby and you sit there looking at your computer and you smile and that's about it. You k

now, you stand up, you eat something and go to bed. When you battle against people day in and day out. You develop a mutual respect and often times a friendship. And at some point we connected off of Full Tilt. Started chatting online, quickly he became a friend. I still didn't know his real name. You come up playing online  and make so many friends through the TwoPlusTwo forums and through connecting with other mutual friends and just chatting online. You know a lot of people by screen names an

d you actually get to know  a lot of people really well just by their screen name. A lot of the general public who followed online poker  were so curious who he was and were trying to guess who he was. To me, I never cared. I knew who he was, he was the young online player that I played against all the time and I knew that once I learned his name, it was going to be a name  that I hadn't heard before. So it just didn't matter to me. The 20 year old Swedish Pro. Mr. Viktor Blom. The first time I

met Viktor Blom (Isildur), was in Vegas during World Series of Poker. It wasn't at a WSOP event. I met up with him for dinner at Lemongrass at the ARIA and he was this giant smiley friendly guy. Other than having to look up really high to talk to him, we we got along great. During that dinner it was  the first time we had spoken. We' only typed online and the kind of excitement and not just his voice but his face when talking about poker was very evident. Specifically, I remember him  asking me

about triple draw, which was the main game I was playing at the time. It's 2-7 triple draw, five card draw game, where you're trying to make a low hand. It's completely different from No Limit Hold'Em and PLO (Pot Limit Omaha) like not even close to similar strategy and he just found it fascinating. He was asking me, are the games good? He sees them running at high stakes. He likes to play high stakes. So I could tell that he had some curiosity about learning the game. I realized the strategy wa

s hard to explain without a deck of cards and so we went back to my apartment where I had a poker table and deck of cards. I wasn't teaching him how to actually be a winner at the game, nor was I trying to hustle him into actually playing it but I was just teaching him the basics. He was curious and he was having fun. A couple of months later he was playing nose bed triple draw and playing it pretty well. Triple draw is such a technical mathematical game, yet somehow his intuition and Incredibly

fast speed of thought. Helped him figure it out. A few years after we launched  Run It Once Training. After a lot of convincing, Viktor agreed to record some training videos with me. He was living in London at the time. So, I flew from the US to London. I brought a couple of headsets and I was prepared to hold his hand as  we made these training videos together. By this point I knew that  Viktor was not a studier. I knew that he wasn't much of a strategy talker and so I knew it was not going to

be easy for him to explain his genius in the  form of a training video. Before I went, I had prepared a lot of hands that we had played together, saved them all, put them in poker tracker so that  we could review them one at a time and discuss them and I would ask him questions and he would explain what he was thinking and why he made the plays that he made. I got to London, we hung out and then it came time to  record the training videos and long story short, it was just it was not going to wo

rk. I would ask him questions and he would have a couple words and I would try to guess: "Like, oh, so were you thinking that I was representing a two pair type hand here, but because of earlier streets I wouldn't have that hand?" And he was just he would just say: "Yeah." [Laughing] So, it just wasn't it wasn't going to work out. It wasn't as if I was letting him down by saying, all right let's not do this. He didn't want to do it. He was really doing it because I  had to push hard to convince

him too and I was really excited to do it because so many people wanted to get inside of his head. He'd never talk poker strategy, yet he was this poker genius. But as it turns out, those thoughts only work inside his head. It seemed he was living a pretty  fun life out there in London. He would play poker when he felt like it and he definitely compared to me who treated poker as a bit of a job. He played it purely for fun. He just loved it and the joy that he showed and excitement that he showe

d playing  poker was unlike anything I'd seen. One thing I didn't know before going there, is that Viktor was a bit of a movie buff. He also had a really big movie collection. A lot of DVDs surprising number of romcoms. He like to sometimes start his  day by just going to the cinema and catching a 3:00 p.m. movie before  coming back and starting his poker grind. Which I'd never done before. I guess I still haven't because I went with him. But we went twice during that 4 day stay. One thing peopl

e may not know about me is that before poker I was a bit of a gambler. I like to gamble. So I would play Blackjack. I would bet on Sports and getting good at poker learning the fundamentals of Poker kind of beat that gamble out of me and I thought it was gone, but staying with Viktor and watching the way that he  would gamble reignited that in me. Which was not a great thing. But it was really fun to watch him. I think at the time he had  something like $150k in his account and he was playing $2

00/$400 and $300/$600. You know, with two to three buy-ins. He'd run it up to $300k, it went down to $10k, at which point he started playing $10/$20, would go back up, he would move back up in stakes, go back down, he would move back down in stakes, at one point he was down to $200. He was playing $100 heads up sitting goes. Spun that all the way up to $25k again, before eventually losing it all. He didn't like to lose, just like none of us like to lose, but he was just loving it. And to watch h

im in his  element was really interesting to have that kind of firsthand account of... I don't know, a level of loving gambling, that I hadn't seen before, up close. The decisions, obviously didn't look smart, however he was having fun. He was loving it and he was loving the competition. The level of passion and excitement that he had playing $100 heads up sit and go's. Two hours after he was playing  $300/$600 PLO was astonishing. Despite Viktor's brilliance  and aptitude for the game, that per

haps is unmatched. His habits or lack thereof got the better of him. He was playing against anybody and everybody whoever was available and sitting at any game. And he was not studying in the  way his opponents were studying and the tools were getting better and better. So the not studying was costing him more and more and of course most of all he loved  to be playing the highest stakes that he possibly could at any given time. It just went poorly for him and whereas most people might step down

in  stakes when their downswing gets too big. Viktor wasn't the type to do  that until absolutely forced to and when you're absolutely forced to, it's too late. I don't know the precise details but I know that Viktor went on a down swing online. He lost a lot of money live. Playing open-face Chinese, which is not a game he knew how to play and never quite recovered. I haven't stayed in close enough touch with Viktor to know how he's doing. We chat, very rarely and you know it's the cordial, how'

s it going? And it's the smiley's from him: "Doing great!" But given the love that he had for the game that I saw in his eye, I would  imagine he's sad about that and I'm sad not only for him but just that that level of genius that he had was in a sense being wasted right now and I don't mean that everybody needs to be  making lots of money with their abilities. I don't mean that you have to be  achieving at the highest level. I just mean that poker's a beautiful game and he has a beautiful mind

for poker especially. It's something that I loved to witness  even when I was across the table from it. Will there ever be another Viktor Blom? I don't think so. The game is different these days. In the post solver era, raw talent is not enough anymore. Plus there is only want Viktor Blom.