Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom is arguably the most exciting poker player ever. His meteoric rise to stardom came in 2009, where the anonymous 'Isildur1' alias emerged on Full Tilt Poker, playing high-stakes games online against the likes of Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius.
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Viktor Blom Net Worth: It’s becoming more common for poker players to appear on the scene and grab people’s attention for both good and bad reasons. Some personalities are loud and obnoxious, others more mysterious. This is where Viktor Blom fits in: best known by his online username ‘Isildur1’. Blom came onto the scene out of nowhere in 2009. Here’s his story.
Early Career
Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, on September 26th, 1990, Viktor Blom started playing poker at the tender age of 14 years old. He and a group of his closest friends would often play friendly home games against each other. Apparently inspired by the Chris Moneymaker “poker boom” that happened in 2003, Blom soon realized he had a real knack for the game.
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- He's one of the most Googled poker players in the world, but he rarely gives interviews. He's a bit shy but fearless on the tables. Viktor 'Isildur1' Blom is a phenomenon, no doubt about it.
By all reports, it was Blom’s brother who helped him take his first tentative steps into the world of online poker. His brother created an account on PokerParty.com, which enabled Viktor to practice under the username of Blom90.
However, he soon dropped out of this site so that he could play and practice for 15 hours a day. This lead to him joining the Full Title Poker site when he was 18 with the now-legendary username Isildur1 and playing $.50/$1 NLHE online.
It didn’t take Blom long to realize that his ultra-aggressive style caused real trouble for his opponents after he managed to win $2 million in a few weeks using a deposit of $2000. This happened in 2008 and turned out to be his big break.
Professional Poker Career
Despite battling such online heavy hitters as Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius, it was Blom’s 2009 matches against Tom ‘durrr’ Dwan that grabbed people’s attention. By November that year, the still-unknown Blom (playing as Isildur1) had made almost $6,000,000 on Full Title Poker, with the majority of his winnings coming from the pocket of Dwan. Isildur1 was almost solely responsible for Dwan’s devastating loss of $8,000,000 that year, so much so that Dwan (who would eventually rebound) refused to play any more games against the enigmatic and reckless Isildur1.
Blom’s reputation as an unpredictable and foolhardy player came into sharp focus once he started playing multiple tables at the same time, something considered insane by most other players.
November 2009 also saw Blom play simultaneous games against Phil Ivey and Antonious, which lead to Blom lose $3,000,000 and Antonius winning a record-breaking $1,356,946.50. Blom soon lost a further $4.2 million against Brian Hastings, which seemed to spell the end for the prodigious Swedish player.
However, in 2010, PokerStars offered him sponsorship, allowing the 21-year-old to continue playing poker. This lead to Blom appearing in person at a real-life venue named Superstar Showdown in 2010 so that, finally, his identity became public. This didn’t seem to faze Blom, though, as he went on to win $1.25 million in the $100,000 Super High Roller at a 2011 live event known as PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.
Adding to Blom’s mysterious nature, his poker appearances have been sporadic, to say the least. Throughout 2013 and 2017, he won one World Championship of Online Poker title and four Spring Championship of Online Poker titles. As he steadily moved over from online to live play (moving between Sweden and the United Kingdom), his total live tournament cash is believed to be as high as $3,000,000.
Two of his most recent big professional wins include the 2018 PartyPoker Million Germany live event against Pavel Plesuv (with an astonishing $1,054,000) and in 2019 with $5,424 (after he came 2nd in the World Series of Poker Europe event).
Viktor Blom’s Achievements at a glance
Viktor Blom Biggest Cashes
Viktor Blom’s Recent Earnings
Viktor Blom Net Worth
Isildur Poker Reddit
Due to Blom’s disinterest in publicity and penchant for playing online under different names, it isn’t straightforward to gauge his exact net worth from poker winnings. What also has to be taken into account is that Blom’s poker technique very much involves losing huge sums about as often as he wins big, meaning his net worth fluctuates wildly between 0 and millions.
The high-stakes DB graph of Viktor Blom claims his net worth is in the red: -$4,740,045 after playing over 1,218,784 hands, with an average earning (or loss, in this case) of -$3.88 per hand. PokerStars show him in the green, $1,818,493 earned over nearly 1,400,000 hands, winning $1.32 per hand. The Hendon Mob Database puts him 503rd on the All-Time Money List with total (live) earnings of $2,897,797 and $1,254,400 best (live) cash.
Personal Life
Isildur Poker Net Worth
Blom is said to be quiet and unassuming in person, the inverse of his brash playing style. After moving to London around 2010, he was said to have hired a personal assistant so that he could focus on playing and practicing poker.
One famous story concerns Blom at a £100,000-entry event in London, at which he wore a black shirt covered in thousands of small skulls. When Blom was asked about his shirt, someone else at the table said each skull represented every opponent Blom had defeated. Blom deflected the good-natured laughter with a polite smile as a way of dealing with his fearsome reputation.
However, his “play anyone” mentality wasn’t the only thing that sometimes got him noticed. The Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri claimed, in 2012, that Blom owed tax in Sweden to the tune of $150 million. Although subsequent reports are thin on the ground, so it’s entirely possible this case came to nothing, or Blom reached a private agreement.
From all accounts, he lives back in Sweden in an undisclosed town and, although he doesn’t avoid interviews, his sense of privacy makes grabbing him for a chat tricky. In an interview for pokerlistings.com in 2017, he stated that all he knew about poker in ten years’ time is that he’d still be playing it.
Most recently, Blom has been linked with a new poker app, Pokio, which includes a section overseen by Blom: Isildur1’s Game. Players can hone their skills against him, with a chance to compete in the 2020 World Series of Poker Main Event.
Conclusion: Winning Big and Losing Big
Viktor Blom made a name for himself at a surprisingly young age for a poker player. Perhaps this added to his trademark playing style of reckless betting, or maybe that’s how he prefers to play. As the only player who can lose huge sums just as quickly as winning them, Blom always guarantees an exciting match. What the future holds is unknown, but one thing is for sure: Blom will continue as one of the most entertaining if enigmatic players in poker today.
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Swedish online poker pro Isildur1 is a relative newcomer to the industry. He took the high-stakes Pot Limit Omaha and No Limit Hold’em worlds by storm in November of 2009, squaring off heads-up against players like World Series of Poker (WSOP) November Nine member Phil Ivey, Tom “durrrr” Dwan, and Durrrr Challenge participant Patrik Antonius. He has challenged the very best that the Full Tilt Poker stable has to offer, as many of his opponents are sponsored pros of the world’s second largest online poker site.
Isildur1 jumped out to a sizable profit over his opponents. His hyper-aggressiveness was somewhat similar to Dwan’s, constantly putting foes at tough decisions for much of their stack. By the first week of November, Isildur1 was up $1 million according to Poker Table Ratings and crossed the $2 million threshold shortly thereafter. On November 15th, 2009, Isildur1 had raked in more than $5 million from his opponents. Most of his success had come at the expense of Dwan.
On November 21st, Antonius took down a record-setting $1.3 million pot against Isildur1. Two days later, Ivey was the victim of a $1.1 million haul by the Swede. Then, the bottom dropped out. By December 1st, 2009, Isildur1 was $1.7 million in the hole, a nearly $7 million real money swing at the tables on Full Tilt Poker.
Who is Isildur1?
The debate has raged on in the online poker community as to the true identity of Isildur1. The Swede’s true identity may never be known due to complicated tax laws in the Scandinavian nation, but early speculation was that Robert “Gulkines” Flink was the mystery man.
On PocketFives.com, Frank “Frank1The1Tank” Calo sourced CardLovers.com and posted, “Fwiw, I have received intelligence by some very credible sources (who shall be kept completely private) who said pretty confidently who isildur1 is. So I give you the knowledge I have (with like 99% certainy but not quite 100% yet) that it is Robert Flink aka Gulkines. No this is not a level or me having fun or w/e. I can say with like 100% certainty that it isn’t viktor blom either fwiw.”
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Others such as poker bad boy Tony G pointed to Viktor “blom30” Blom, a young Swedish pro. However, he has denied being the high-stakes newcomer, telling Bluff Europe, “I am not the one you are looking for. Keep searching.” In a chat that popped up on November 30th, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies addressed Isildur1 by name as “Viktor,” but was not corrected. Other rumors have pointed to Todd Brunson, who is American.
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Effects on High-Stakes Poker
Isildur1’s arrival sparked a renaissance of high-stakes poker on Full Tilt, with regulars flocking to the site to watch the matches unfold. With millions of dollars swapping hands daily, sites like Poker Table Ratings and High Stakes DB have seen their traffic explode as poker fans review hands and seek stats on each player. It’s unmatched action and all happening on a USA-friendly site.