Patrik Antonius, Jens Kyllönen Featured In 'Last Call' Poker Documentary Series

08:56
18 Dec

A new poker documentary series chronicles the stories of two successful Finnish pros, Jens Kyllönen, more commonly known as “Jeans89” online, and former high-stakes regular Patrik Antonius. The two episodes were produced by former pro Miikka Anttonen, who is known for his storytelling abilities.

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Overnight Millionaire
The first installment of the Last Call series follows the life of Jens “Jeans89” Kyllönen and features one of his good friends Dan Tolppanen, a famous Finnish rapper also known as Uniikki. Tolppanen, Jens and famous Finnish pro Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies became close friends, and Tolppanen witnessed just how much money the two were playing with.

“To me it was crazy watching Jens and Ilari do six-figure player transfers on poker sites like it was nothing,” Tolppanen said. “They were like, ‘Yo, lend me $100,000?’ ‘Okay, here you go.’ Those kinds of sums were astronomical to me, and these guys were younger than I was.”

Jens played an integral part in introducing the game of poker to the limelight in Finland. At just 19 years old, Jens took first place in the European Poker Tour Copenhagen for a little over $1 million dollars.

“Just before we met, Jens had won EPT Copenhagen for over a million dollars,” Tolpannen said. “It was actually Jens’ victory that finally brought poker into mainstream attention in Finland as well.”

The film documents many aspects of Jens’ life, including how he handled the fame he achieved so quickly at such a young age, how he has been able to be successful, and how he keeps a level head playing at such high stakes.

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From Pennies To The Nosebleeds

The second installment of the Last Call series features Patrik Antonius, the Finnish tennis pro turned high-stakes crusher. Now living in Monaco, Dan Tolppanen sat down with him to discuss his origins, his introduction to poker, and much more.

Antonius started playing poker at a young age with his friends for small amounts of money. On a good day, Antonius would come home with five Finnish marks. Later on, he found a poker group in his tennis team and started to play more regularly.

“I originally started playing poker for pennies with some friends when I was 10 or 11 years old,” Antonius said. “We played Five Card Stud and some other variants similar to that.”

It was the games with his tennis team that really excited Antonius because they were played more consistently and for much higher stakes.

“If we didn’t have tennis matches or tournaments the next day, we’d spend Friday and Saturday nights watching sports, ordering pizza and playing poker,” Antonius said in the interview.

Antonius also talks about meeting Ilari Sahamies and watching his rise in the poker world.

“I first met Ilari at a pool hall, and he soon joined our poker game,” Antonius told Tolppanen. “Ilari was quite a loud mouth, but yeah, it was that same ring where Ilari’s poker career got started as well.”

Both episodes of the Finnish documentary series are available in full length on YouTube. There will be more episodes of the series released on the Pokerisivut YouTube channel this month.