Viktor Blom has probably got only a couple of day to make hay while the sun shines. You see, the WSOP in Las Vegas is coming to an end, and as the field in Main Event thins out towards the final nine, more and more high stakes online pros are going to return home, and exchange their hoodies, hats and sunglasses for mouse, keyboard and multi screen grind stations. While they are in the Nevada desert, the games online have been, marginally at least, softer, allowing a top flight pro like Viktor to take advantage. Now this situation is about to come to an end, and the other sharks are returning to the pool.
Viktor started off Wednesday dipping his toe into the water of the FLO8 pool of players. He played 22 hands of $2k/$4k against Kyle “KPR16” Ray which cost Blom a total of $69,003.
While he was playing this, he was also playing $400/$800 NLHE at a bunch of 6-Max tables.
Three tables entered the mix, and Viktor played a total of 869 hands against a motley crew of players, including Douglas “WGCRider” Polk, “Denoking,” “Trueteller,” “Rhje” and everyone’s favourite donator to a game, “MalACEsia.”
Ike Haxton was recently quoted by Card Player as saying that “MalACEsia” was driving the high stakes games at Bovada. So much so that the other high stakes regulars attack in a feeding frenzy, doing their best to be sat at the table against this unknown Macau resident, in order to pick up their share of the “free” money. It’s not that “MalACEsia” is a bad poker player, it’s just as Ike said ““He’s not a clueless amateur; he’s just not world-class, I think it’s someone who plays a lot of poker over [in Macau]…he might even be a professional poker player and just winning a lot of money in the live games in Macau.”
On this given day though, Viktor wasn’t able to make a profit, and “MalACEsia” actually turned a profit of $331,980. Viktor, on the other hand, lost $384,529, with the majority seemingly being split between “Denoking” and “MalACEsia.”
We have some of the action from this session in the video below.
After his NLHE action, Viktor took a little time away from the action, but was back in just over an hour, this time playing FLO8, again at the nosebleeds.
He started off against Kyle “cottonseed1” Hendon, and played 47 hands of action against the Canadian, coming out $25,990 ahead and beginning to try and salvage the day.
After this, Viktor sat down again with the other Kyle and played 127 hands against the “KPR16” account. Blom was able to mitigate some of his NLHE action here and picked up a $129,942 profit against Mr. Ray. We caught some of the action against Mr. Hendon and have it for you in a nice little video package.
This was the end of Viktor’s poker for Wednesday, and he ended up stuck $297,600, dropping his yearly total to $4,927,516. Based on those numbers, I don’t think Viktor will be begging for his dinner for a while yet.
The NLHE sessions did raise a worry for me about Viktor’s metal game. He has been working on it really hard recently, and that has been obvious based on his recent play and results. What he hasn’t had to deal with much is being sat at a full table (probably with a waitlist), playing against 4 other “pros” and a “cash cow” single mark. Viktor is obviously +EV against the mark, but how does he fare against the remainder of the table, and is he taking this into consideration when he continues to play after losing many buy ins?
While Viktor will normally be able to make money from the single player, how much will he lose against the other players at the table, and is it a profitable situation? I don’t think Viktor continually evaluated his situation as the game progressed, which lead to him continuing to haemorrhage chips as he played a big session.
Based on his previous leaps and bounds in his mental game, I don’t expect it to be long until either Viktor, or his mental game coach, picks up on this, and the correct adjustment is made.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this situation, and also doing my best to find out who’s responsible for the massive adjustment in Viktor’s attitude.