Famed nosebleed stakes player Viktor “Isildur1” Blom is not typically one to put himself in front of the camera. Fairly media shy, he tends to stick to the comfort of his computer, playing on the (somewhat) faceless virtual tables. But this Wednesday, May 27th, he will jump aboard the Twitch train, making his debut on the live streaming phenomenon and broadcast his play to the masses.
The event has been organized in conjunction with Unibet, the online poker site on which Blom will play. Unlike other poker streamers on Twitch who just play the games they want to play and encourage people to watch, this session will be setup specifically to give many people a chance to directly participate. Blom will be streaming for a staggering 10 hours, going from 13:00 BST to 23:00 BST (British Summer Time; equivalent to 8:00am to 6:00pm Eastern Daylight Time), playing on up to four tables simultaneously.
Rather than just playing his normal stakes, though, and basically shutting most players out, Viktor Blom will stick to more affordable games, ranging from NL50 to NL400 and PL50 to PL400. He will also move to different tables around every hour to try to give other Unibet customers to a chance to both play against him and get on the live stream.
During the nearly half-day session, Blom will be answering questions from viewers in addition to narrating his games. He will be easy to spot at the tables, not only because he will presumably be playing under his name, but he will also have a custom avatar of his own visage. Speaking of which, Twitch stream viewers will be able to actually win that avatar. Unibet is not letting anyone know how this will be accomplished just let; people will have to watch the stream at www.twitch.tv/unibetpoker to find out. I don’t know about you, but I would very much enjoy briefly intimidating my opponents at the $5 Sit-and-Go tables by displaying Viktor Blom’s face.
Blom came out of nowhere in late 2009 when he suddenly appeared in the highest stakes games on Full Tilt Poker, throwing money around like it was nothing. He got involved in five and six-figure pots like I would get involved in pots for peanuts (literally) when playing gin with my grandfather. Of course, there were already players playing at the nosebleed stakes, but the poker community knew who they were. “Isildur1” was a complete mystery and he looked like he wanted to keep it that way. Finally, in January 2011, he revealed himself as Viktor Blom at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.
According to HighStakesDB.com, though, he has not done well at all in cash games. Since the site began tracking him, he is down $5 million lifetime on Full Tilt and down $633,000 on PokerStars.
