OK first of all I have to admit that the title is slightly provocative, but as that seems to be the way all the cool kids are writing news and articles these days I guess I have to follow the suit.
In case you don’t know who Isildur1 is you have most likely been playing poker for less than couple months or have been sleeping the last 6 months. But anyway I guess a small recap is in order: at the end of the last year poker player called Isildur1 from Sweden appeared out of nowhere at FullTiltPoker and began playing their biggest games. This included games such as $500/$1000 no limit texas holdem headusp and $300/600 pot limit omaha. What was even more remarkable was that unlikely most people who play these games, he actually had the guts to challenge the best players on the planet including names such as Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius and play huge amount of games at the same time against them. At first Isildur1 managed to win several million dollars (mostly from Tom Dwan aka durrrr), but at the end Full Tilt Poker’s red pro Brian Hastings (with the help of his friends) won all Isildur1’s moneys in one huge $500/$1000 pot limit omaha session and sent the Swedish player back to home.
In USA you are supposed to pay taxes on all of your online poker winnings. However in Sweden (home country of our hero) the situation is slightly different: you are only supposed to pay taxes on the winnings that come from online poker rooms which are located outside EU. Exactly what makes an online poker room an EU one is slightly uncertain but the general consensus is that for an example the winnings from Betfair And EverestPoker are tax-free but winnings from PokerStars and FullTiltPoker are taxed based on the income tax scale (and in Sweden the income tax can easily reach 50% of your income).
What all this comes down to is that it is possible that Isildur1 in a sense playing with government’s money. Let me explain my thought process: Let’s say Isildur1 plays mostly at the European poker rooms to avoid having to pay any taxes, but for some reason he had decided to deposit little money to PokerStars (or other non-EU poker room) and play some big tournament earlier in the year. He then went and won $500,000 from the tournament, near the end of the year (when he first appeared in the biggest FullTiltPoker games) he realized that he would have to pay 50% taxes of his $500,000 win thus meaning that in reality he only $250,000. That is obviously a huge amount of money to almost everyone, but Isildur1 had been crushing the games at the European poker rooms and thus the $250,000 wasn’t a huge part of his bankroll.
So he realized that he could take the $500,000 to FullTiltPoker and challenge the best American poker pros on their own ground. If he were to lose the $500,000 he would have in reality only lost $250,000 and wouldn’t haven’t deal with the tax issue, and if he manage to get really luck he could take $500,000 to $10million in couple months, pay taxes on it, retire from poker and move to tropical island for rest of his live.
The above might also explain why Isildur1 played so high variance style, so many games at the same time and so long sessions. Or he could just be that big of a gambler.
