With the looks of a runway model and the physique of a professional athlete, Patrik Antonius sticks out like a beautiful sore thumb at most poker tables. Yet behind the stunning façade hides one of the sharpest poker brains of the new generation – Antonius has been compared to Phil Ivey by Barry Greenstein, who also called him “one of the biggest winners in the history of online poker.”
Young Patrik Antonius was born in 1980 and he has played poker since the age of 11, but growing up he was determined to be a professional tennis player. He would have probably succeeded at tennis if a back injury had not put him off the professional circuit permanently, much in the style of other poker legends such as Doyle Brunson and Erick Lindgren. He then turned his attention to poker, and his rise has been nothing short of meteoric: from winning $275 in his first ever tournament at Casino Helsinki he went on to amass a quarter of a million dollars through online play, and currently boasts lifetime live tournament winnings of more than $2,800,000. Not bad for a player who admits to only attending tournaments when he needs a holiday or a warm spot away from Finland.
Although the money keeps rolling in from online play, tournaments and cash games, Patrik Antonius is more interested in the prestige: “I don’t play tournaments for the money; it’s more the honor that I want to achieve. I want to be remembered as one of the best cash-game players to have ever played the game.” To this end he has issued challenges to several famed live and online pros including live legend Doyle Brunson and online champion Tom “Durr” Dwan.
Some of his achievements include being inducted as a member of the prestigious Full Tilt Team, being a regular at the Bellagio’s nosebleed stakes “Big Game,” playing the hand with the largest pot so far in GSN”s High Stakes Poker (it was nearly a million dollars, and Antonius took nearly $750,000) and storming Poker After Dark: out of three appearances he won one against Brad Booth and finished second twice to Jennifer Harman and Johnny Chan.
In early 2009, Antonius accepted Tom “durrrr” Dwan’s open challenge to the poker world and put up $500K to Dwan’s $1.5 million. The two will four-table each other heads up at $200-$400 Pot-Limit Omaha or No-Limit Hold’em for 50,000 hands, and upon completion the leader will keep his winnings plus the original sum.
Patrik Antonius’s game analysis (by Barry Greenstein):
- Aggressiveness: 9
- Looseness: 9
- Short-handed: 9
- Limit: 7
- No-limit: 8
- Tournaments: 7
- Side games: 8
- Steam control: 5
- Against weak players: 7
- Against strong players: 7
