Tuesday
January 12, 2010
Compared to many other players. Phil Ivey didn’t play a lot of online poker in 2009. This didn’t stop him from being one of the top winners of the year, once more cementing his reputation as the best player around.

The year didn’t start so well for Ivey, and he fell to his low point of the year in the middle of February when he was at -$2.5M after dropping $400K after a session of $500/$1000 PLO- From there, however, he turned it around, hovering between breaking even and +$2M over the next seven months. After this, he really took off, and from the middle of September and two months onwards he won $8M, reaching his peak at $7.44M on November 22nd. After this, he played very sparingly, but still managed to lose close to a million dollars, but I am sure you will agree that his overall results were acceptable nonetheless.

Looking at Ivey’s splits, it is easy to see that he is very good at all the games. He is the only player we have looked at so far who has won at all Stud, Hold’em and Omaha. Granted, he lost in some of the sub-games, most notably in limit hold’em, but the number of hands is quite small, so the sample is not large enough to say that he is loser at that game. The same can be said about the Stud results, but since I have seen many top players state that Ivey is the best Stud player in the world, I choose to believe that this is reflected in these results.
Ivey rivers a flush against Isildur1’s middle set to win a $833K pot.
This was the largest pot that Ivey won in 2009, and though he got a bit lucky here, you can’t fault his play. The hand was a part of an earlier report which you can read here.
Ivey flops top and bottom pair which holds up against Isildur1’s flush draw. $558K pot.
In Ivey’s largest NLHE hand of the year, Isildur1 was again involved. You can read my original comments here .
Both of these hands came in the sessions leading up to Ivey’s peak on the 22nd of November, and as I have stated before, he played very little after that. Hopefully it won’t be too long before he puts in some serious sessions again. I am sure his fans are having withdrawals at this point.
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