Viktor Isildur1 Blom - Whats going on?

Absolute gold, thank you. I wish it was longer

This is great!

You actually put ****ing a glimpse of 2009 Svenska Spel software in there at 2:16 lol. Nice job. Money felt so ****ing real on that software for some reason.

This is good stuff, thank you

awesome piece, now itching for a follow up on viktor post nosebleed stakes life

really hope one day (even if it's 10-20 years away) someone connects with him on some kind of emotional/intimate(non sexual) level and writes/records something of it. bc a lot of us im sure relate to him, his experience was just so much more extreme and it would be interesting to get deep into what made him this way

That was cool, I was hoping Phil would maybe talk about the time that they were thinking about/possibly being roommates

Isildur1 story is amazing and inspiring.

But lets be sincere, there will never be another Viktor Blom. Anyone that tries to replicate what he did will go busto 100% in one week or even 2 days.

If we compare his trajectory with OtB RedBaron, LLinus or Stefan, everything Blom did becomes less impressive. He made a lot of decisions that are super trash, you don't see elite poker players doing stupid **** anymore. And the thing about this is: it makes poker less fun watch.

Like Galfond said, raw talent means nothing nowadays. And I see some people here in 2p2 trying to deny the fact that poker is starting to become more like chess than anything else.

It's time to leave 2009 in the past for once and for all and grow up. It will be better for the game, even if it makes the game less fun

Very good short doc but it’s so incredibly ironic and nauseating that the person who narrating it, and talking about raw talent, solvers and studying and romanticising the ‘love of the game’ or Viktor’s ‘brilliant mind’, is the person who basically created poker training sites and ruined poker in its rawest form and enabled a bunch of people to get better quicker than they should’ve of, by actually playing and putting in the work like most of us did back in the day before training sites, programmes and whatever. It’s also hilarious given Galfond got rich off Guy and that’s where most of the money even came from. I don’t care how ‘nice’ Galfond comes across, he specifically is one of the main catalysts of why online poker is ****ed. Viktor was a G tho obv.

I know I sound like a hater but this is a hill IÂ’ll die on.

Nah, UIGEA and Black Friday, and idiot politicians regulating everything, killed the game as it was, by drying the game of fish. If haters used half of their hating energies against those politicians, maybe things would be a little better nowadays? Global pools, not so ****in hard to deposit significant sums of money etc etc etc

No one who tried to fight teachers, authors and, above all, technology, ever succeed in deter progress. See what happened with the luddites 😃

Im not talking about the catastrophic event like UIGEA, BF and the KYC ****. If you've played for long enough part and way back then, he def had an effect on the games and started this ******ed coaching thing, which made the games worse, not killed them off completely, all the events you describe, plus coaching/training, plus solvers and bots have killed it. But he played his part for sure, especvially making games worse in the golden era. If you dont think so, you werent playing back then.

Doyle Brunson killed the game when he published Super System.

Jokes aside, Cardrunners started the coaching thing in 2005 and the games were still super soft up until the politicians did their thing.

Yeah I mean SS helped me a tonne. And yes games were still soft up until way after all that stuff, but still PG contributed to the demise imo.

Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allens untold Isildur stories.

Seems kinda unfair to Viktor to leave out the part where the two guys combined their databases together and colluded to basically cheat him out of his bankroll. Loved it otherwise.

Quite the detail to overlook tbh

I wonder if VB had a heads up PG was putting this out. How strange that would be to log onto Youtube and find a 20 min documentary about how much of an f'n degen you were during your rollercoaster ride to busto

I love the fact that Isildur could not verbalize his thought process. He was a savant, he just invented how to play and could not explain it. This is why solver poker is so sad these days. There are no styles, there is only one way now, the PIO way. Galfond could be right about Isildur, he may be sad these days regarding how it turned out, but if it was any other sphere, he would be revered. Just so happens that poker is not like sports or arts and the endgame of profit is the only metric, with extenuating circumstances disregarded. He went broke and that is that, with no room to appreciate his feats.

Poker will never be the same, and I'm glad he got out because the game is not about intuition and nous any more. There is no place for people who don't study, a lot of the beauty of poker has been stripped away by computers, and that is quite sad. Poker used to be abstact.

*and ran 3 million dollars over EV in 2000 hands

Pretty sure this was, in large part, because he wasn't a strong English speaker?

He's swedish. He's a strong English speaker.

lol he's still playing but ok

galfond is 0% as cool as Isildur, I would rather he didn't talk him

if you'll check out his HHs from back in the day (a ton of them can be found in old High Stakes threads, it's an interesting read), you'll see that he his NLHE play was, in fact, much more "solver-like" than anyone else's back then.

It wasn't some sort of crazy agression that made him unique (although gto is generally more aggressive than humans), it was the fact that he was just much better balanced.

As an example, it was a common wisdom back then that you are supposed to barrel off all of all your draws and you could see that even at the highest level of play. Isildur was the only player who would actually some times xback or x/call a flushdraw without showdown value. This in turn allowed him to have bluffs or value in spots where his opponents had basically none.

This is just an example, but just from looking at those HHs it is clear that he was just on another level, and if solver was only allowed to use big bet sizes (smaller sizes were one thing he did not figure out on his own), the outputs would probably be way more similiar to Isildur's play than anyone else's

I agree with you. The point I was trying to make is he played solver approved stuff before there was a solver. And he somehow got there on his own, therein lies his genius.