Gus Hansen Still Up, Isildur1 Down Again

Thus far, the 2011 high stakes ring game news has been pretty redundant, and there’s been no notable change in the leaders or the losers this week, though once again plenty of money was changing hands at the nosebleed tables at both Full Tilt and PokerStars. The big winners and the big losers, though, were all the usual suspects.

On the losing end, once again, was none other than Viktor “Isildur1” Blom. Blom’s been riding this roller coaster for months, proving his heads-up mettle in his SuperStar Showdown bouts then throwing his profits away in regular heads-up ring game play. Blom had a super sweet victory over Daniel Negreanu on Sunday, but by Monday night all his challenge winnings were in someone else’s stack.

Isildur1’s primary Monday night beneficiary was PepperoniF (better known as Full Tilt regular Rui Cao). While PepperoniF wasn’t Isildur1’s only opponent, he definitely took the lion’s share of the loot, to the tune of nearly half a million dollars. What’s perhaps most surprising about Isildur1’s most recent colossal loss is the fact that it was not the result of a couple of bad hands but rather of one long, epically bad session that covered more than 4,000 hands and multiple NLHE and PLO tables.

Another frequent 2011 loser (with the exception of his significant lead in the durrrr Challenge), Daniel “jungleman12” Cates, generously gave Isildur1 a small cash transfusion at the NLHE tables, allowing the troubled Swede a small comeback toward the end of the night. Even with that minor victory, Blom still finished his long Monday night session a painful $423,000 in the red.

It was a totally different story for Gus Hansen who made yet another successful weekday appearance at Full Tilt’s $500/$1000 PLO tables. Hansen was easily one of the biggest winners of the night with a full $135,000 in profits (in a considerably shorter session, too). Though overall Hansen finished 2010 in the red for his online play, he came very close by breaking even toward the end of the year, and it looks like he hasn’t lost that momentum. All in all the Great Dane is up more than $4 million in the first few months of the new year, making him the man to beat at the online nosebleed tables.

While Hansen will likely continue his winning streak through the week, many wonder if Isildur1 will try to avenge himself at the regular ring games or if he’ll go into hiding until the second part of his SuperStar Showdown challenge against Daniel Negreanu resumes on Sunday.

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