We interrupt your Easter Sunday munching of chocolate eggs top bring you news about the Swedish poker legend known around the world as Isildur1. While we have all been stuffing our faces with chocolate of dubious quality, Viktor Blom has been working, and in the past 24 hours has put in over two thousand hands at the highest stakes available on Full Tilt Poker. After a short session on Friday costing Viktor $180k, he quit, and came back last night an put in some serious volume. While obesity and heart disease may be in our future due to an overdose of the aforementioned chocolate, Viktor Blom may be more concerned by his recent change in form from running hot enough to boil a kettle, to cold enough to cryogenically freeze little Isildur1s for later use.
Blom’s day started with a short 120 hand session of 2-7TD at the 6-Max $1.5k/$3k tables, and combined with an other 2-7TD session, earned Viktor a nice 90k profit. So, the day started out well, but this was Viktor’s only “win” for the day, and the ride may not be suitable for those of you with sensitive stomachs.
Viktor’s next stop, after a moderate 8 hour break, was the PLO tables. While some sessions did garner Viktor a profit, the majority didn’t, and ironically the table named “Gondor” was not kind to the Namesake of the Second King of Gondor and Blom lost $323,318 at this table alone. Other tables were kinder, but Viktor’s PLO tally for the day had him losing a significant $339,542 across all his PLO tables. We have a few of the hands from this action below:
Viktor also tried out his FLO8 game, and while his 1st 69 hand session had him in profit to the tune of $244,980, his later sessions were not as helpful to his bottom line. In the end, Viktor’s FLO8 game cost him $110,065 for the day. Some of the beneficiaries of this were “cottonseed1” and “KPR16.” In a brief ray of sunshine in Viktor’s day, “SallyWoo” appears to have been a victim as well, with Viktor able to take advantage of his apparent edge over this FLO8 expert.
Viktor’s day also included some time sat at some NLHE Hold’em tables, with opponents including “SanIker.” Again, not everything went against Viktor, and he did book some winning tables and sessions, but overall, he ended up losing $56,934 at the No Limit Hold’em tables. We have a few of the bigger hands below:
Viktor appeared to be in a Hold’em mood, and also played a session of Fixed Limit Hold’em, over 2 tables, against 2 villains, “KP16” and “jama-dharma.” WHile losing to Kyle “KPR16” Ray, Viktor did play a longer wining session against “jama.” Even so, Viktor couldn’t overcome the loss to the American, and ended this game with a $32,492 loss.
This left Viktor Blom, who is most likely on the other side of the planet from his London base, having an Easter where I doubt the chocolate is tasting as sweet as it could be. He ended the day down $448,357, most of which came from his loses at PLO. He is currently standing at a yearly profit of $3,255,867 which may have left enough for him to buy a few Easter Eggs.
If I step back from another losing day, and look at these numbers, it’s not as bad as first glance would lead you to believe. Viktor’s main losses were at PLO, a notoriously swingy game, and if you take out the results from the “Gondor” table, which is 165 hands out of 775 PLO hands played, it was barely worse than a break even session. Even with it in, it’s still only just over 8 buy ins for a 40BB Cap table, well within a statistical variance for the game.
“But Viktor lost in nearly every game!” I hear you exclaim! True, but if we ignore the dollar signs, how much did he really lose? Playing NLHE at 30BB capped tables, he lost less than 2 buy ins. His FLO8 losses are a little more concerning at just under 28 Big Bets over 364 hands, but are still within reasonable variance numbers, and his FLHE numbers of losing just over 8 Big Bets over 83 hands are pretty standard.
We sitting on the rail tend to only see dollar signs, as it’s doubtful we will ever get to play with sums this big. If we remove those dollar signs and insert numbers of big Blinds or Big Bets (as we should do when playing anyway), the massive wins and losses we see from the nosebleed games are much less impressive. Variance (or luck if you’re that way inclined) is part of poker, and can have a massive impact on the short term, especially if you are playing higher variance games such as PLO, FLO8 and 2-7TD. Over the long term, skill is the deciding factor, and this year alone, Viktor Blom has put in 105,007 hands on Full tilt Poker, and this doesn’t include any of his live play. Over that sample, he has won $3,255,867, and over his lifetime at Bovada of 485,519 hands, Viktor is up $1,039,180. That number also includes the $4.2 Million lost to Brian Hastings after Hastings had conspired with other players to build a massive database on Isildur’s play style by sharing hands, which is considered by most to be cheating.
So on the religious festival about a man rising from the dead, as hard as I try to use it as a metaphor for the career of Viktor Blom, I can’t. The numbers speak volumes to say, while Viktor may have won and lost fortunes, he is still a long term winning player, and if you remove the scandal from 2009 from the mix, his long term numbers would keep other high stakes players up at night in a combination of fear, envy, and fantasy.
I’m off to eat some more chocolate, and hunt the Easter Bunny looking for more chocolate eggs to feed my cravings. If you want to avoid the Type II Diabetes that’s sure to be in my future if I catch the little bugger, you could head over to Full Tilt Poker, and see if you can get ready to win a sponsored contract. All you need is an account, and you can download the software here if you don’t already have one.