Over the Thanksgiving holidays I ran into my Swedish psychiatrist friend Petrus, who lives in Copenhagen and spends his spare hours grinding online poker. “I haven’t slept in a month!” he said to me when we met. “I haven’t either!” I yelled back. And we both laughed. We knew we were talking about Isildur.

“It’s a Swedish thing,” Petrus professed. “Have you read Quereshi’s article about the match? Every Swede is rooting for Isildur. What he’s doing is shaking up the American dominance of the game. I root for him and I root for Sweden.” For me, that was only a small dynamic.

I, like I’m sure all the rest of you, spent maybe twelve hours a day for nearly a month watching intently. Hours next to the desktop or laptop, with four to six tables called up, furiously sweating the big pots between Isildur and any of a number of opponents, as he went from Durrrr to Antonius to Cole South and Townsend, with Ziigmund and Ivey thrown in. If you have any sense of drama and the history of the game, you know you did it too.

The simplest way to sum up Isildur is that he is the closest thing to the living incarnation of Stu Ungar that we have ever witnessed. Talent is for sponsorship deals, as was inevitably borne out by his finish in flames. His main character flaw is an inherent love for the game and a disregard for money so blatant as to be positively stomach churning. Several times I felt nearly physically ill for the destruction that he was wreaking on himself in his tilted moments, where he was always not going to quit until he went broke. The destructive gene resides in all of us, moments of tilt have to be faced up to as part and parcel of success in this arena, but Isildur made us all feel bad about our calling. Going from four million to broke in one day is not cool. It makes history, but what of it?

You can compare Isildur to Stu Ungar but it’s something more. It tells of a behavior so destructive that he can surely never recover from this in one lifetime? People say he’ll be back, but what is the difference? I see Isildur so traumatized by the turn of events that his life will repeat itself in these runs, each one always ending in total brokenness. His talent is unquestionable. Someone told me that on a scale of one to ten, Townsend rates Isildur a ten at No Limit Hold’em and a seven at Pot Limit Omaha. But what of it? It all pales in comparison to the number someone is when they are on tilt, and on tilt Isildur might be no higher than a four. He might be nothing at all. He went from owning the world to just shoveling it in. He was doing no more than playing a video game while sitting there online, an arcade game that only ends in game over. Which brings us to the next interesting thing about Isildur. His love for the purity of the game is unquestionable.

We have learned that when it comes to cash game poker, heads-up play will rule the world for at least the near future. It is so sexy when it comes to playing the game for the game itself, to establishing your name on the top of leader board; the highest points scored hall of fame at the end of Ms. Pac Man. And Isildur holds the all time record. He matched himself without any regard for game selection, with no motive than to take on the best and beat the very game itself. In that respect, he’s proved his point.

I really do believe that Isildur might be the best heads up No Limit Hold’em player in the world today. Every dollar he made was absolutely untainted. There were no Guy Lalibertes in his rise to the top, no free bonuses, no gimmes, no extra lives. Just a sequence of FullFlush, Qureshi, Durrrr, Ziigmund, Ivey, Antonius, and Townsend. A zero to seven million point total that can only be topped by the ones who come after, others who take on the challenge for the challenge itself. The money is not secondary. There is no money. And there can be nothing for Isildur except to beat his score before it’s game over again. But like a video game, new levels will keep on coming until it’s always game over.

Brian Townsend

The player who revealed nearly as much about his character during these landmark days in the history of poker was Brian Townsend. For it was only two years ago when he started a path that was much like Isildur. Rising through the ranks of No Limit Hold’em, taking on all comers, and looking to challenge himself with an attitude that he couldn’t be beaten. Cold reality came in the form of Bobby Baldwin and the big game at the Bellagio.

BTW: Baldwin, who if you realize that nothing has happened to in the poker world except repeats of the human condition, was once an Isildur and a Townsend himself. His book Bobby Baldwin’s Winning Poker Secrets has been lost to history, a shame because in some ways it’s the most realistic poker book that was ever written. The first edition was a very limited release. When the second edition came out, they took out all the good parts, they took out all the truths. There was no place for them in the poker world, a very revealing account of how Bobby Baldwin really came up. One part in the book was a section entitled Your Bankroll. Read it yourself.

Back to Brian Townsend. He lost a million dollar pot to Bobby Baldwin, who showed him that talent is for sponsorship deals, and then Brian showed a tremendous amount of character. He owned up, he went into his shell, he dropped down in stakes. He went back to work. He spent over a year teaching himself Pot Limit Omaha, and took to heart all the intangibles about the game that have nothing to do with talent: bankroll management, game selection, work and study. By the time the opportunity came to take on Isildur, Townsend had put himself back into the highest stakes arena with a few caveats. He was not going to let Isildur break him. He was going to dictate terms, and he gamed Isildur something fierce. At first he refused to play him higher than $200/400. He played him in short sessions. He painstakingly went over every hand. He jumped into the fray when Isildur had already been playing many hours and was a bit tilted up. And then, when it became clear that they were going to have to play Isildur at $500/1,000 or not at all, he put the team together.

It should be noted that everything I write about Townsend’s actions during this period is a guess, an assumption. I have no knowledge of what really happened, I only know Brian casually and have no direct line to his deal. But what I think happened is that he gathered together a whole team of people to launch a combined bankroll to play Isildur. I’m guessing that some of the shareholders didn’t even play. I’m guessing that the principals were Cole South, Brian Townsend and Brian Hastings. I’m guessing that Townsend was player number one and that Cole was player number two and that Hastings was player number three. It just happened to be Hastings that broke Isildur in the end, but it could have been anyone.

They tracked his every hand, his every movement and his emotional state. They tag-teamed him old school, like the way the big boys broke Huck Seed in the nineties and Stu Ungar in the eighties. They were relentless, they were 24 hours a day, they lived and breathed this mission. At no point did they reckon that they were liable to beat Isildur on even terms, but that’s not what poker is about. And there was nothing shady or illegal, in my mind, about the way this coup was done. There was no cheating, there was just execution at its highest level and attention to detail when it comes to millions of dollars. They didn’t beat Isildur at the game of poker. They beat him at a game of character. And Townsend has shown that when it comes to character, he has a whole handful.

Durrrr

In some ways this story has been more about Tom Dwan than anybody else, because durrrr is the one who has raised the biggest unanswered question about himself. A question that was answered for sure is the one about how much money did Tom Dwan have. The answer, clearly, not enough for the stakes he was playing. I spent three days with Dwan in the middle of this saga, three days in London when he was buried against Isildur and obviously worried about the stakes he was committing, three days when he played on the Internet all night and then played days in the heads-up cash game being filmed for TV.

First off, I was as impressed by Dwan’s mental toughness as I have ever been with any poker player. His yawning and his low boiling point are not an act. He has a philosophy that on one hand decrees that the point of poker is to make money, pure and simple, and on the other hand that the way to achieve that goal is to play the game the best way he knows how at all times. His ability to detach himself from the situation and make the proper play no matter what the pressure and stakes is nearly inhuman. He is a cool rider who has absolutely no fear when it comes to trusting his judgment for marginal execution. And the way he could lose a million dollars from what had to be a very ropey tank playing all night, and then come in on no sleep and never lose his temper, not once, to the what can be infuriatingly silly demands of television production, were rather inhuman.  

I have a tremendous amount of admiration for Tom Dwan. When you see the world bringing every force of negativity and pressure to bear on one person in one instant, you see deep into him as a person. Poker throws that up sometimes and Dwan threw it back with a force field of laid back character. Durrrr’s problem, right now, is his ego.

As Phil Hellmuth once said, if you call yourself the best poker player in the world and you are the best poker player in the world, then do you really have an ego? Right now, Tom is wrestling with this dilemma. Whether or not Tom Dwan can, or will, beat Isildur in the long run at No Limit Hold’em is something that may be debated, and the more it’s debated the less important it will be. What is most likely is that by the time the two do meet to sort it out again there will be somebody new around that is even more important. The question that durrrr now has to wrestle with is the ultimate question about his place in the world: can he live in a world where he may not be the best poker player in it? I say that if his answer is yes then he can be the best. If his answer is no, then he never will be.

People will put forth ideas that Tom Dwan is a fraud, that all his money really came in soft games against Guy Laliberte, that he’s not really that good, that the whole thing was a series of lucky coincidences propelling his rise to the top. I will never give credit to those claims. Dwan is undoubtedly one of the most prodigious poker talents of his time and one of the most exciting players I’ve ever watched. He will be back at the top again as sure as silk is comfortable. But he will wrestle with his ego in the manner of Phil Hellmuth until he can live in place where a game can be turned down if the conditions aren’t right. Isildur is not durrrr’s nemesis; durrrr’s nemesis is currently himself.

Patrik Antonius

We all knew Patrik was cold as ice. You only have to look at him. But what was confirmed during his sessions with Isildur were two things for sure. One, that Patrik has no friends in the world of poker, and two, that his bigger picture was that he was never going to get so involved as to let Isildur threaten what he already has. A very nice life. Patrik played Isildur a whole bunch of times, but never in desperation and never because of ego. And after a while he refused to play him at Hold’em full stop.

At one point, it seemed that even Patrik felt like the swings required to take on Isildur were a little out of control and not the smartest move for his bankroll management. He did things that are completely legal while not exactly spirited, like lurking at empty tables while Isildur was already involved, trying to lure him to his own games. Not exactly the kind of thing that is going to make you best friends.

He also showed a huge amount of being capable at quitting while behind, and not letting Isildur threaten his bankroll or income. He cared, but was not going to let this be a tuning point in his life. He’s worked too hard to get where he is. Antonius is a guy with all the brains and all the talent, and no interest in the poker world any more except as a source of his lifestyle. Even gamble with him seems a calculated ploy. He is one cool runner.

Phil Ivey

Ivey answered a question that has been posed with such a resounding clap that the question need never be asked again. Phil Ivey does have so much money that he just didn’t care. The stakes, big enough to make every other person in the poker world squirm, weren’t even high enough to fascinate his interest more than mildly. Ivey dabbled against Isildur with success, and could easily have been the one to break him. But five or seven million just didn’t captivate him enough to make him drop everything and have his tongue hang out to put the time in and wait. Phil just let it sort itself out and continued on with his life.

In the scheme of the whole story, only Phil Ivey can really give a belly laugh. He has beaten the poker world so bad that he may never be taken down from the top. This is the guy we can still all talk about, the immortal, he is the top of the tree in the poker world. Ivey is number one when it comes to the player.