When we left Viktor Blom yesterday, he was playing through the change of date, after a pretty disappointing day.
This left me thinking about what Viktor wants to get from playing poker (apart from money of course!) and it came to me in a dream last night: RESPECT. Viktor is still a young guy, and he has been bombarded by criticism his entire career, mainly from people who couldn’t get anywhere near his level of skill. This epiphany has given me a little insight into the psyche of Viktor Blom, and can explain some of the concerns I’ve been having about our hero, but more about that later.
Viktor’s day continued on without a break after the action from yesterday’s Watch, and he was straight into more action at the FLO8 and LHE tables.
The FLO8 tables were a breakeven run of 755 hands, with a minor loss of $27,145 for Viktor. What stopped this session following the recent trend of Viktor’s for leaving on a losing streak was a pair of heads up sessions of FLHE against Watch regular “SallyWoo.” The two played 590 hands of nosebleed limit Hold’Em, and Viktor swung a $114,898 win over Sally. We caught some of the action and have a highlights package for you below:
After an eight hour break, to most likely get some beauty sleep, Viktor was back at his grind station playing a combination of 2-7TD, FLHE, FLO8, and even played a single hand at a Mixed Game table. The 2-7TD tables saw Viktor make a nice profit of $113,201, with most of that coming from “kagome kagome,” and the small amount of FLO8 saw Viktor playing against fellow Full Tilt Professional, Gus Hansen, for a small $55,995 win. The big action was at the FLHE tables, where Viktor was up against Patrik “FinddaGrind” Antonius, along with other high stakes regulars. Blom managed to make it three out of three for his return to the tables, and the FLHE tables gave him a profit of $270,926, taking his daily profits to over half a million dollars. We have a few of the hands from these games below:
That brings us to the main event of the day, and again it was between Viktor “Isildur1” Blom, and Ben “Bttech86” Tollerene, two players who are certainly not strangers to each other. These two played out nearly a thousand hands against each other for the rest of the day, and kept jumping tables. All of the action was at the $500/$1000 $40k Cap PLO tables, and we have identified 5 distinct “mini-sessions” to help us analyse the pattern the action took.
Mini-Session 1 was the biggest of the day, and consisted of 332 hands over 3 tables, and saw Viktor down $102,991 to the American.
Mini-session 2 was a better session for Viktor, and he made a profit over the 201 hands, again at 3 different tables. Viktor made $210,895, more than enough to erase his previous losses in the first session, and gave him a cumulative profit on the day of $635,779.
The next session saw Viktor take another step back, and over 229 hands and 5 tables, he consistently bled $193,422 out of his online bankroll.
In the penultimate session between these two player, Viktor took control again, and over the short 72 hand, 3 table segment, he won $159,423 from his PLO nemesis.
The last session is where it all really started going wrong. With 3 tables in play, over 152 hands, Tollerene crushed Viktor for $481,942, taking his profit over the Swede for the day to $408,037. We caught some of the action, and all of the hands below are at the capped pot limit of $80k.
The day ended with Viktor’s daily profit line standing at $119,838, which nudges his yearly profits upwards to $2,980,883.
As I was saying earlier, it seems that Viktor is craving respect, not only from other players, but from the poker playing public at large, and he seems to be determined to prove that he is the greatest player alive by not backing down from a confrontation, even if he’s losing massive amounts of money.
While Viktor’s recent reluctance to quit may be due to this completely uninformed opinion of mine, I don’t think this influenced his sessions with “Bttech86” last night. While the mini sessions were going back and forth, Viktor was still very much in the game, and was actually in front before the last session.
After he lost nearly half a million dollars in 152 hands, Viktor quit for the day, most likely the correct thing to do.
This may be the first day this week that I don’t have any issues with Viktor’s wider meta game decisions. He played well, and only really lost money in the last part of his PLO battle with Tollerene, which is always a risk when playing someone of his talent and skill. He quit when he needed to, and left the day with a small profit. After recent history, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see Viktor continue to play against the American taking his daily results deep into the red.
We’ll have to see if this is a new leaf for Viktor, or if he’ll revert to more usual behaviour tomorrow.
I’m off to listen to my collection of 60’s soul and R&B, and see if I can earn a little respect of my own on the poker tables.
