Brian Hastings is the 9th winningest poker player on HighstakesDB with 180304 hands played and a total profit of $3,890,941 (detailed graph). The player has been tracked since 2008-03-10.
Brian "Brian Hastings" Hastings is an American player from Hanover Township Pennsylvania. He has a degree in economics, graduated from Cornell University in December 2010.
Inspired by one of his teachers in high school, Brian began playing online in 2006. For the first six months he struggled at the No Limit Hold 'em micro stakes tables, breaking about even. Then he really started to work on his game, reading about strategy on the online forums and later joined the training site Cardrunners (a site were he now is one of the more popular instructors), the results of Brians research came fast, he started to win, but didn't cash out, he kept his winnings in his account and quickly moved up in stakes.
Like many other US poker professionals, Brian moved out of the US and currently resides in Vancouver Canada, to be able to play the highest stakes on the internet.
Hastings' mainly focus is on Pot Limit Omaha online, where he has been extremely successful, he has also done really well in NLHE as well. However he hasn't been afraid to try other forms of poker on Full Tilt: Highstakes fixed limit H.O.R.S.E for example, a complicated game with a whole lot of variance, an experience that cost Hastings more than $2 Million.
When it comes to live tournaments Hastings results hasn't been nearly as successful as he has been online. His single biggest win so far came in August 2011 when he took down the $2K WPT NLHE Regional Summer Splash for $213,877.
Hastings is perhaps most known for winning $4.2 Million in The-Beyond-Epic-5-hour-Session against Viktor "Isildur1" Blom on Full Tilt Poker in December 2010. A session at the true nosebleed stakes, were Hastings played well, but also ran like God, the ultimate recipe for making some serious dough.
Hastings' biggest hand ever came, big surprise, in The-Beyond-Epic-5-hour-Session against the fearless Swede Viktor Blom. It's a monster, when you look at the fact that it contains 683 big blinds. But when every single one of those 682 big blinds is $1K, it's bigger than that, it's Godzilla on steriods. At a first glance, it's possible that Brian Hastings turn bet could look bad, considering Isildur1 holds top two pair (actually top three) but Hastings has as much as 47,5% equity on the turn. A hand that shows how powerful a wrap draw in PLO can be, when all your outs are live that is. Advantages of playing good draws strongly is that you will get paid of bigger and way more often with hands like sets, you become harder to read and opponents more likely to tilt.