Viktor Blom has been working hard over the past few days, with each day consisting of at least 1500 hands. He seems to have been grinding his way through the day, doing his best to improve his profit line for the year. In the end, does it even matter? He’s keeps going round in circles, winning, and then grinding breaking even before he spirals out of control and loses a lot of his hard won money. All we as watchers can do is keep watching, and see if Viktor can change.
Today’s article covers both Wednesday and Thursday’s action.
We’ll start off with a quick round up of the action from Wednesday, and we head to the 2-7TD tables where Viktor didn’t have the best of starts. Over 208 hands, $169,184, with the lion’s share seemingly going to German poker pro “Kagome Kagome.”
No Limit Hold’em made an appearance on Blom’s schedule, and saw him meet “riyyc225” on the felt. We’ve not seen this account turn up in the Watch yet, and there is very little information out there about who this might be. What we do know it that over 218 hands of $500/$1000 $30k Cap NLHE Viktor made a profit of $72,270.
Next up was the biggest volume game of the day, FLO8. Here Viktor was up against the usual crowd in a 6-Max environment, and over 1058 hands, made a very impressive $500,269 profit. We caught some of the action when Viktor Played “SallyWoo” heads up as part of his FLO8 day. We have a video of some of the action below.
This brought Viktor’s Wednesday to a close, and he ended up with a $368,478 profit in the win column.
Thursday’s action started off with some PLO action, and a decent amount of the action needs to be filed under “Tollerene Head Butting Session” as Isildur was again up against his apparent PLO Cap nemesis in Ben “Bttech86” Tollerene. The Force apparently wasn’t with Viktor on this given Thursday, but neither was it with Tollerene as the only difference in Viktor’s bankroll was $5,612 as he played 282 hands of PLO. We have some of the action from these tables in the video below.
Next up was a combination of 2-7TD and FLO8 tables that didn’t go well for Viktor. While he started off brightly at the nosebleed 2-7TD tables by winning $120,724 over 120 Hands, it didn’t last. He ended up losing $212,686 over the next 162 hands of 2-7TD to out him in a hole for the day. The hole only got deeper when he started to play FLO8. The first 171 hands saw Viktor jump out to a $218,035 deficit, and wasn’t able to dig his way out of the hole over the next 303 hands with as he made a small $9,892 profit.
Thursday ended with Viktor down $305,717, and ended both days with a small $62,761 profit. This nudged Viktor’s yearly profit to $3,168,366, which still has him as the top earner online this year.
Pretty much, what Viktor won on Wednesday, he lost on Thursday. Wednesday wasn’t a bed of roses to start with, at some points, Viktor was down over $250k, but he managed to come back, and ended up turning a profit, largely due to the great action at the FLO8 tables.
Thursday saw Viktor try to do the same. He managed, for all intents and purposes, to break even at the PLO tables, but his 2-7TD, and especially his FLO8 game, cost him dearly.
He was always behind the action, and didn’t get on the profit side of the line all day. But, I’m not about to go on a tear through his game, calling him out for poor game selection. Both 2-7TD and FLO8 are swingy games, and the results Viktor posted do some wins in there, enough for me not to be overly concerned with him spiralling out of control. Before the last 2 tables of 2-7TD cost him badly, he was on course to have a mediocre losing day, and the FLO8 session he played after that actually turned him a small profit.
These two days actually show the life of an online high stakes poker player pretty well. One day you’re up, one day you’re down. It can be due to you playing badly, but it can also be just down to the cards not liking you. This is why we need to look at poker players both over a larger statistical sample, and on the smaller scale, into patterns of when/why they win or lose.
I stand by my assertion that Viktor may be one of the most gifted players to ever pick up a pack of cards, but I’m not saying he’s perfect. He has issues in his game, ones that I think can be easily resolved, if he gets the correct advice and help. If he does that, he could be unstoppable. In theory at least.
