Viktor Blom is a complicated man, and over the past few months has been making my life very interesting. I have been “stalking” one of poker’s elite around Full Tilt poker, and it has given a fairly decent insight into the world of a high stakes poker pro. I now know that I could never handle the swings Viktor does, nor do I have the innate talent needed to grind cash games. But Viktor Blom isn’t perfect, the man is not a machine, and he has flaws. Mr Blom however has also been working on his flaws, and we have seen him making improvements in the mental side of his game. We’ve been seeing significantly less occurrences of Viktor spiralling out of control and tilting off a load of money.
Viktor’s day started off on Wednesday with some PLO $500/$1000 $40k Cap and he played two “mini” sessions, together totalling 511 hands.
The first of these saw Viktor make a $161,103 profit from a mere 46 hands as he started off his campaign for a profit. The next session should probably be considered his Dunkirk, as Viktor dropped a massive $555,737 over 465 hands. while not a knock out blow, it certainly wasn’t a great experience for Mr Blom.
It was so bad, Viktor took a five and a half hour break from the tables, and when he came back, he was playing 2-7TD, and as you’d expect, he was at the nosebleeds.
Isildur1 was up against “Kagome Kagome,” heads up, at a 6-Max table, and they played each other for a short 87 hand session. This resulted in a $33,001 loss for Viktor, and we have some of the biggest hands from the session for you in the video below:
After another three and a half hours away from the games, Viktor was back, again playing PLO $40k Cap games. This later session was split into two “mini” sessions, and the first of these was over 150 hands. Viktor made a $95,008 profit here, the majority of this came from “Raging Heart.” The next action saw Viktor grind out 736 hands in a session that ran over the date line, and earned Viktor a $285,269 profit. Viktor kept playing through the change in date, and we’ll cover this action off in the next article.
We have some of the action from this high stakes PLO, and have a short video for you below:
As the date changed over, we took a snap shot of Viktor’s profit line, and confirmed he had made a loss of $47,358, taking his profit line for the year down to $2,239,344. Blom is now in 4th place in the yearly cash game profit line contest, behind Ben “Bttech86” Tollerene, Alexander “PostflopAction” Kostritsyn and Kyle “Cottonseed1” Hendon.
Again, yesterday’s action shows that Viktor has been really working on his mental game. The two long breaks he took were after a losing stretch of play, and gave Viktor a chance to clear his head, and come back with his concentration at a high level. He also seemed to know that after his 2-7TD session he wasn’t in the right head space, and when he came back after his second break, he was able to turn a decent profit. I have my suspicions about who may be working with Viktor, but it becoming more and more obvious that he is getting some mental game coaching. 2 months ago, Viktor would have “played through the pain” and would have probably dropped half a million dollars for the day. While fans of Viktor may be enthused by his new skillset, I don’t think that enthusiasm is going to be shared by other high stakes poker players, who might see a non tilting Viktor Blom as the nut worst opponent.