With all of the media’s attention on big time live tournament poker, where players are measured by virtue of their latest cashes or their lifetime tournament winnings, the world of high stakes online poker certainly receives a lot less attention. However, this is a whole different world, and one that definitely doesn’t take a back seat to anything.
It even was the case not long ago where online pros were seen as fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t until big time tournament players like Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen become heavily involved in big stakes online play that people really paid much attention to all of this.
The story of young Swedish online poker pro Viktor Blom really opens us up to the world of big time online poker, as in spite of not being anything like a household name, he has played a central role in the story over the last few years and in spite of very little live tournament success or even live tournament play for that matter, he is one of the hottest poker pros anywhere over the last few years.
Viktor got his start in poker at the age of 14 when he started playing micro stakes poker with his brother and their friends. Before too long, once he turned 15, he opened his first online account. His first very small deposit became turned into $300 after he won the very first tournament he played. Several months later this few hundred dollars had turned into a few hundred thousand.
He soon ended up moving up the stakes and lost it all, but he simply started over again. When this happened again, working his way up to this higher stake and then losing it all over again, he remained completely undaunted. The third time was the charm, and in spite of the wild ups and downs that higher stake online poker can present, he stuck this time.
At the ripe old age of 17 he rattled off an amazing total of $1.7 million in just 2 weeks, and he was making such a name for himself that other players on the sites he played at stopped giving him action, and he had to move to a different online site, Full Tilt Poker, where the opportunities for high stakes online play was significantly greater, but so was the competition.
Here he was faced with playing the world’s best, such as Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Patrick Antonius, and others. In spite of this he did manage to rack up $6 million in winnings there, only to see all of this go away plus another couple of million. Not easily discouraged though, he stuck with it and won back the $2 million he lost and several million more, and along the way he participated in all 10 of the largest pots of all time.
In perhaps the most spectacular collapse in online poker ever, Viktor’s game hit the rocks, including the largest single day loss ever seen, in the amount of $4.2 million, in a heads up match against Brian Townsend.
With mad skills like this though, nothing will ever keep him down for long, and he continues to ply his trade at the biggest games online, as well as now getting into live tournament play as well, including a win on the circuit worth over a million dollars. Still only 23, Blom is an amazing talent and he continues to make a big splash on the poker scene.
