Brian Townsend, who currently resides in Santa Barbara, California, is a professional poker player known for his dominance of Full Tilt Poker’s No Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha short-handed games. He’s been successful enough to earn TV appearances on shows like GSN’s High Stakes Poker and NBC’s Poker After Dark, on which he won $120K by defeating Doyle Brunson heads-up.
Despite his ascent to the top of the poker world, Townsend has been the cause of controversy on two separate occasions. Soon after he became a Full Tilt Poker pro, it was discovered that he had violated the site’s terms of service by playing on two different accounts. He admitted to using the name ‘Stellarnebula’ to play lower stakes games and was promptly suspended from Full Tilt Poker for six months.
More recently, he was part of a crew of players, which also included Cole South and Brian Hastings, who shared Isildur1 hand histories in order to construct his situational ranges. Hastings went on to beat Isildur out of $4.2 million, but all three players were subsequently disciplined when it came out that they had shared information.
In 2010, Townsend, who had served as lead instructor and part owner of CardRunners.com for the past three years, stepped down from his positions. His blog on CardRunners states: “As of June 1st I will no longer be a lead instructor at CardRunners. I will still be around in the capacity that I was before I joined CardRunners as a lead instructor. You can find me in the forums participating in discussion as well as watching the videos.”
He went on, saying: “There is a lot that goes into being involved in the running of a small business while also playing poker full time and having a life outside of poker. It can be difficult to give enough time to everything. CardRunners is still a great business but it is one that is much more time consuming than I would have imagined.”
One thing is for certain, the more poker Brian Townsend plays the worse it is for his opponents.