Viktor Blom Wins PokerStars Sunday Grand PLO For $30,199

If $1,050 PLO six-max tournament played online sounds like the sort of thing that would attract only the most specialised high-stakes, four-card artists, you would be correct. Just 88 players converted their Bitcoins to US Federal Reserve notes for the occasion before throwing another 47 rebuys into the pile. This made for a $149,000 prize pool, $30,199 going to the top dog, and the rest split in tiers with the next 18 players. Given the toughness of the field it seems perhaps fitting that one of the biggest names in online poker, and one of it’s earliest celebrities Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom, took down first place. 

Viktor Blom has almost disappeared offline, with just one live cash since 2014 (2nd place in a £3,000 event for Unibet earlier this year). But 2017 has been a bumper year online for Isildur1; after five months of being as near to break even as a PLO specialist can expect, he hit a hot streak in June and is currently sitting around $1.4million in profit from cash games for the year so far, representing a little over half his life-time earnings.

That rungood has carried over into his tournament game it would seem; although he may have dropped three buy-ins to get there, his first place finish added three stacks of high society to his profit graph. It may seem like small fry compared to his cash game winnings, but every little counts when you deal with the swings that come from being a degenerate, a heads-up grinder and a Swede.

The Sunday Grand

PokerStars hasn’t been running the Sunday Grand tournaments for very long, but they seem like a welcome addition to the online landscape. The slow structures with 25,000 in starting stacks and 50/100 blinds to start, going up every 15 minutes in increments that start as low as 20% makes for a WCOOP feel all year round.

The final table also emphasised the internationality of the game at the moment without a single flag repeating on the tournament results tab in the top 9 places and 12 nations represented in the 19 cashes. 

The six-max final table paid out from $6,998 for 6th place (Yuri ‘theNERDguy’ Martins) to $22,524 for the runner-up (won by YOUYOU777). Unfortunately, amongst all these “winners” not everyone turned a profit; Jackon1985 took home $2,491.72 for his min-cash in 19th place. Shame he bought in three times for $3,150. Everyone else at least broke even.

Better luck to everyone next time. Except Blom, who's clearly got plenty of his own.

#TBT

A post shared by Viktor Blom (@viktorb1om) on Sep 18, 2017 at 9:26am PDT