By: John Wenzel 

If you have been following the saga of ultra-high-stakes player Isildur1 over the last few months – both in this mag and perhaps as a railbird on Full Tilt Poker – you have certainly been entertained. Isildur came out of nowhere, an anonymous player who had the audacity to take on the best-known online players in the world at their own games for the highest stakes on the planet (see pages 22-24).

If you have been a player for any length of time, especially if you are the kind of player who has an edge over most opponents, you can appreciate how rare it is to find people willing to put a lot of money at risk. Back before the poker boom, when poker was hanging on by its fingernails, any new, unrecognized player entering a cardroom was salivated over like a wolf over fresh meat. New players were assumed to be “tourists” and of course the regulars, no matter how bad or how degenerate they were, considered themselves light years better than any unknown quantity.

The regulars, most of whom were slowly going broke, spent their days pushing their money back and forth as the house raked pot after pot. So any new player – and there weren’t many – was a godsend. And the grinders quickly learned that the last thing you did was be nasty to the new player. Yes, many of the more desperate pros would abuse the new guy if he put a beat on someone or wasn’t losing his money fast enough, but they would be taken aside by the smarter players who knew that new blood was the difference between making a living and going broke.

Smart players coddled the new players and soothed them like a horse whisperer. They did nothing to make them skittish and treated them like kings, or at least appeared to. Yes, they were all trying to take the new guy’s money while staying out of each other’s way, but they did everything to cover up that fact. And if they new player was going to lose, they at least wanted him to get a little enjoyment for his buck and want to come back.

So while Isildur proved himself anything but a fish, some young pros who should know better made the huge mistake of tapping on the aquarium. Brian Hastings took millions from Isildur in a session that was, well, fishy. Isildur smelled a rat, but still went busto. Hastings then later admitted that his CardRunners colleague, FTP Red Pro Brian Townsend, had shared all his hand histories with him and created a database Hastings used to bust Isildur. Sharing hand histories is against Full Tilt rules, and for good reason. It is an unfair advantage. There is another word for an unfair advantage in poker: cheating.

Not only did Hastings and Townsend gang up on Isildur, but they are CardRunners pros, and CR is affiliated with Full Tilt. There are some age-old words of warning for those in the public eye: You not only have to avoid any impropriety, but you have to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. These guys did neither, and we can only hope that one day Isildur will be back.