One more year has passed by and the poker community will remember the remarkable action that was seen at Full Tilt Poker. One of the first events that remained as a hot topic for many months of last year and still pops-up as a hot topic is the durrrr challenge. The online sensation Tom “durrrr” Dwan issued an open challenge to the poker community, excluding his friend Phil (OMGClayAiken) Galfond. The challenge consisted of playing 50,000 hands in the multi table format (4 tables at a time in the $200/$400 blind limits). The announcement quickly reached the ears of some of the best players in the world and the first one to embrace the challenge was Full Tilt Pro Patrick Antonius; Phil Ivey also showed interest in the challenge but durrrr will have to finish one challenge to move on to the next. Action started only a few days after Antonius accepted and it hit the spot light in the major media sites as well as in the poker forums, but the high stakes action started to heat up at Full Tilt Poker and durrrr and Patrick preferred to pursue “easy money” instead of playing the challenge. Only if there was no other high stakes action going on the challenge would resume, which was a big cooler for the clash.
In the last months of ’09 a new screen name appeared at the high stakes tables at Full Tilt: Isildur1 had money to burn and all the regulars were more than happy to play him, but he turned out to be a excellent player in the NLHE variation and in just a few weeks of play he managed to win millions of dollars from a bevy of players. He switched to the PLO tables, where he still managed to win money from most of his opponents, except from Phil Ivey. Not long after the change into PLO, players Brian Hastings, Cole South and Brian Townsend shared their hand histories to create a big database to decode Isildur’s style of play and they had a lot of success: Brian Hastings used the compiled data and managed to crush Isildur at the tables, leaving him over $4 million the poorer.
A large percentage of the poker community liked Isildur1, so the news about the database that was built in order to crush Isildur heated things up and Full Tilt Poker had to enforce their rules. Full Tilt does not allow data mining and because of that a suspension was put in place but only for Brian Townsend. Due to the fact that it’s the second time in which Townsend receives some sort of punishment from Full Tilt it’s still unknown if he will be returning as a Red Pro again.
As ’09 reached its final minutes the top earners for the year were: Antonius with an estimated $8.9 million, Phil Ivey with more or less $6.3 million and Brian Hastings with around $4.7 million.
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