Christmas is upon us and while you are stuffing yourself with your preferred holiday food, I will try to sum up the high stakes year of 2009. I will do this by writing one report on each of the players that have garnered the most interest during this year. I am starting with Isildur1 aka (insert speculation here) since he, while not having a very good result in the end, was certainly the player who captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of railbirds across the world.
The rise and fall of Isildur1 has been well documented, and this graph shows a two month roller coaster ride that no other player has been close to matching. On November 15th, he reached his peak at $5.98M and presently he is at his lowest point, having lost just over $2.2M.
Looking at his results split per game, it seems apparent that he should stick to playing NLHE. Even if you take away the $4M he lost to Hastings in that one legendary session, he would have been a net loser in PLO. However, my guess is that he will have to play PLO in order to get anyone to plat him at the highest stakes. With the difference in results that we can see here, I can’t see many players taking him on in NLHE. The exception might be durrrr, who might want to get his revenge for many losing NLHE sessions, and probably Phil Ivey who is not known for ducking anyone.
The more prudent question in the immediate future would be whether Isildur1 has the money or the backers to get back into the big games. I have no information to shed any light on this topic, but my gut feeling is telling me that we haven’t seen the last of the Swede at the highest stakes.
I will now give you Isildur1 largest pots won and lost in each of the games:
Isildur1 hits Gin on the flop and Ivey pays him off all the way to create a 1.12M pot.
Patrik Antonius flops a wheel, but has to fade Isildur1’s twelve winners twice to win the largest pot in history.
This hand is probably also one of the largest coin flips in history. After the flop, Antonius was a marginal favorite with an EV of 55%. I am sure he let out a big sigh of relief after the river was dealt.
Isildur1’s Aces hold up against durrrr’s AKs. $695K pot.
This was the largest pot that Isildur1 won this year, and there is little surprise that the hold’em pots are generally smaller then the PLO ones. There are fewer big draws in NLHE, so it is mostly when you have two made hands that both players are willing to put 2-3 buy ins into the pot. In this hand, you could argue that you have two made hands since durrrr will never fold AKs against an aggressive player like Isildur1.
Durrrr turns two pairs and rivers a full house to pick off Isildur1’s aces.
As in the largest NLHE pot he won, Isildur1 held aces in the largest pot he lost. And like durrrr in the previous hand, there is no way he was going to fold when durrrr made his move on the turn. With the many straight and flush possibilities that were out there, durrrr could very well be on a draw, so Isildur1 just had to go with it and hope that his hand would stand up in a showdown. I am sure he felt a bit cheated when the cards flipped over and durrrr showed him the trash hand, though.
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