The hottest poker news of 2009 were mostly about one player, Isildur1 from Sweden. Isildur1 came from nowhere and won almost $6 millions in a couple of weeks and then lost it all + another $1.5 million in just a few days. After that, Isildur1 had another upswing and was plus for a day or two before he started losing again. Even though Isildur1 lost so much money, many of the world's best poker players praised the young Swede by saying that he is an outstanding poker player who just needs to avoid playing such long sessions and that he should stop playing PL Omaha and stick to NL Holdem instead.
The big scandal
Isildur1 made many poker players even richer when his game wasn't at its best. For example, he lost about $4 million dollars in one single session to Brian Hastings, and also a few more millions to Brian Townsend, Cole South, Illari Sahamies, Phil Ivey etc. Shortly after this, Isildur1 disappeared from the high stakes scene and it seemed like it could take long before we heard about the unknown swede again. However, it didn't take long before Isildur1 once again was in the headlines as a big scandal was about to be revealed. It all started after that Brian Townsend got his red pro status removed by Full Tilt for a month because he had used a non-allowed poker program to collect data from the games against Isiludr1. And according to different rumors, Townsend had shared this information with Cole South and Hastings. However, neither of them got punished in any kind of way by Full Tilt. After that Isildur1 got to know about this, he said that he will ask Full Tilt to give back some of the money he had lost, and that he probably wouldn't play at Full Tilt anymore.
Isildur1 playing $5/$10
It didn't take long before Isildur1 started showing up at Full Tilt again. But this time, it was at much lower stakes than before as he played $5/$10 NL Holdem. So how did it go? Well, not so good. Isildur1 played 30 hands and lost about $400. It seemed like the unknown Swede didn't care about the money (who can blame him?) as he made some crazy plays with some really bad hands.
