For one brief moment, Swedish online poker player Isildur1 returned to Full Tilt Poker. Just two months after headlining $500/$1,000 Pot Limit Omaha tables and creating the largest pots that the online poker world has ever seen, Isildur1 sat down at a $5/$10 No Limit Hold’em Six-Max game. Thirty hands were played and, over the course of the session, the mystery Swede saw his bankroll drop by $433.
It marks a pretty shell-shocking moment for the once-dominant powerhouse on the high-stakes online poker scene. The nemesis of our two favorite Durrrr Challenge combatants, Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius, Isildur1 was once up over $5 million at the tables. Then, reality in the form of variance set in, as the Scandinavian dropped like the Dow Jones Industrial Average circa September 2008. His career peak, according to PokerTableRatings.com, was $5.04 million, which he recorded on November 15th.
Within a week, he had fallen to the $1 million profit plateau and, days later, the newest $5/$10 player slid to $400,000. After a brief climb to close to $3 million in the black, Isildur1 cascaded down to -$2.65 million. If you bust out your abacuses, TI-85s, and sun dials, then you’ll see that Isildur1 went on a mind-boggling $7.69 million swing for the worse. Imagine you – our readers – trying to explain that slide to your significant others. I would be sleeping in our unheated garage for six to eight years.
What does this have to do with the Durrrr Challenge, you ask? Dwan and Antonius were two of the major players involved with Isildur1’s rise into poker’s elite and drop into poverty. PokerTableRatings.com has a very dramatic, scientific-looking flow chart showing who Isildur1 won and lost money to. High on both lists are the two Durrrr Challenge combatants. Dwan dropped a silly $5.5 million to Isildur1 during his short two-month tenure at the tables. That’s almost four times as much as he’d have to pay Antonius should he be down at the end of 50,000 hands in the Tom Dwan Million Dollar Challenge.
Meanwhile, over in Monte Carlo, Antonius added $2.18 million to his bankroll thanks to the nation of Sweden. That’s enough to buy a week’s worth of groceries in the Principality and marked the third most taken from Isildur1 behind CardRunners instructor Brian Hastings ($3.84 million) and 2009 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event November Nine member Phil Ivey ($2.91 million). The trio combined for nearly $9 million in winnings.
You can understand now why this is such a big deal. Lost in the shuffle was the Durrrr Challenge, which played out 29,764 hands in 2009. Dwan sits with a $937,000 edge over Antonius nearly one year into the action. A total of 46 sessions have been played and Dwan has won 16,015 pots against Antonius’ 13,640. If Antonius is up at least $1 at the end of the 50,000 hands required for completion, Dwan will owe $1.5 million. If Dwan is up at the end of the 50,000 hands, Antonius will shell out $500,000. In either case, the victor keeps the spoils of the match.
Stay tuned to DurrrrChallenge.com for the latest from Dwan, Antonius, and the rest of the high-stakes gang at Full Tilt Poker.
