The 3 Most Notorious Online Poker Losses in Internet History
By Julien Claudepierre
With the success of online poker in the last few years, and the amount of money passing around in the poker economy, it seems like immoderation in the stakes played online couldn’t possibly be avoided. Online poker has indeed brought to light, if not created, a generation of very competitive and ambitious players, willing to compete on the highest level, in the biggest available games.
Inescapably, big games create big wins, and therefore losses defying the rationality of our everyday brains. So let’s get into this world. Let’s have a look at the most notorious online poker losses in Internet history.
1. Let’s start with the poker story of Guy Laliberté. The French Canadian, founder of Cirque du Soleil, is worth billions of dollars. He’s an amateur poker player, and enjoys battling with the elite of online poker in the biggest games. It obviously didn’t turn very well for him, and this little hobby happened to cost him close to 20M$ in the span of a few years (2007-2008 mostly). Games were building around him and he was “feeding” by himself the whole nosebleed stakes economy, mostly at the 500$/1000$ blinds Pot Limit Omaha and No Limit Hold’em tables.
Laliberté kind of disappeared in the last two years, and the nosebleed action suffered a lot from this. It was then naturally a big BOOM when last year, the player known online under the alias Isildur1 hit the highest tables online. He is a main actor in two other notorious online poker losses I am going to talk about now.
2. Isildur1 is rumored to have moved up from a 2000$ bankroll to a 1.4M$ bankroll in less than two months. He is completely fearless and always ready to play against the best, at the highest stakes. When he appeared on FTP in November 2009, he created by himself a month of complete insanity at the tables.
At first, everybody lined up to play him, since he was unknown to the nosebleed players, who were hoping to find in him a new “good customer”. Some won money, some were crushed, and million dollar pots were played.
Then he played Tom “Durrrr” Dwan, in what has to be the sickest session of online poker ever witnessed. You need to know that Durrrr is considered by many to be a king in the world of online poker; a jewel of pure poker talent.
The two men played 10 hours straight, on six tables of 500/1k NLHE tables. A respected poker player had this to say about the match:
“An unstoppable force meets an immovable object”.
But Isildur1 completely crushed Tom Dwan and won 4M$ off him, therefore applying for the new status of king of online poker.
3. But Isildur1 had weaknesses. He was too fearless, having a complete disregard for money, playing insane endless sessions against multiple elite opponents. Nobody was giving action at Holdem anymore, so his desire for action led him to play the best at PL Omaha, a variant he did not master as well. He slowly bled money to the likes of Brian Townsend, Phil Galfond, and finally ended everything in another epic session again Brian Hastings, losing 4M$ to him.
Julien Claudepierre is a professional poker player and former member of Team Everest. Play poker with Julien today by downloading our free poker software!
