What Ivey, Negreanu, Dwan and Isildur1 Are Doing Online
Between the big live tournaments, the world’s most recognizable poker pros like to pad their bankrolls with online action. Case in point, this week has seen high stakes online action from Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Tom Dwan and Viktor Blom, among others. There have been highs and lows across the board, but that only means more excitement for the spectators.
Team Full Tilt pro Phil Ivey far and away had one of the best weeks of online play so far this year while his teammate Tom Dwan posted some pretty respectable numbers himself. Altogether Ivey was up more than $840,000 the other night after a brief but profitable nosebleed multi-tabling session of 1600 hands. The upswing was just what Ivey needed to launch himself into one of the top three positions in this year’s online earnings leaderboard. Of course he’s still only sitting at about half of what the Great Dane, Gus Hansen, has already tucked away after several hugely successful sessions at the virtual felt.
While Tom Dwan has yet to crack the top ten on 2011’s online earnings leaderboard, he’s nevertheless managed to turn things around after repeated losses to Daniel “jungleman12” Cates. Thanks in large part to Dwan, Cates actually is on the leaderboard with just under $1 million in 2018 online earnings to date. Still, Dwan pocketed nearly $400,000 in earnings this week, pulling him safely into the black and giving fans hope that he might yet stage a comeback in his ongoing Durrrr Challenge against Cates.
Meanwhile, there’s been good news and bad news for PokerStars’ new headliner, Viktor “Isildur1” Blom. The bad news is that Blom was the week’s biggest loser, having donated more than $400,000 to other players’ bankrolls. The big loss still wasn’t enough to put Blom in the top ten for the year’s losers, though, thanks in large part to his SuperStar Showdown winning streak. Currently, Ivey’s primary target kagome kagome sits atop that list with approximately $1.6 million in losses while Phil Galfond is faring almost as dismally with over $1 million in early 2011 losses.
The good news is that Blom will have yet another chance to showcase his impressive heads-up skills in the SuperStar Showdown. And this time around PokerStars isn’t pulling any punches with his challenger. None other than current live earnings leader Daniel Negreanu will be the next challenger for the SuperStar Showdown.
Negreanu hinted at such a match-up after watching Blom soundly beat Eugene Katchalov last month. Now the card bout has officially been confirmed. If you want to see how the current earnings leader and the self-ascribed “best heads-up player in the world” actually compare, you’ll get your chance at 3pm on March 20 over at the PokerStars high stakes heads-up tables.