Now I will talk a little bit about the events that occurred last night on Full Tilt Poker. If you don't follow poker, CardRunners pro, and good friend of mine, Brian Hastings won $4.1 million playing high stakes pot-limit omaha against Isildur1. It was the biggest win in the history of online poker and easily the most memorable event I've ever seen in my 6+ years in the online poker world. The session lasted about five or six hours and I watched probably 80% of the hands. Just to get it out of the way, yes, Brian ran really hot. He ran something like 2.5 million over his expectation in "all-in" pots in the match. This is pretty staggering, although it says something to know that even if he ran at expectation he would have won over a million in all-in pots. To be clear, I'm not necessarily implying that he is definitively a favorite in the match, it just means that he got his money in better than his opponent did in this match. In one session, a monkey could get his money in better than Phil Ivey if the monkey had consistently better cards over the course of 5 hours, which can happen.

When reflecting on the match, it's hard for me not to get a little bit nostalgic. I've known Brian Hastings since he was 16 years old. Yes, he was playing online poker at 16 years old. Yes (big lol) his math teacher at the time introduced him to poker. Brian was one of the first CardRunners members, signing up within a few weeks of our site launching. At the time he was mostly a SNG and MTT player, playing in the $100 sng's and mtt's at UB. I still remember filming one of my first videos at CR, a $200 SNG that I filmed in Andrew's room at our frat house. CardRunners had opened about a week before this video was filmed and we had maybe 50 members (not bad actually, lol). There was a guy in my SNG named Stinger885, and I remembered seeing his name on the message boards and Andrew told me he was a good player. In the end, we got down to heads up in the SNG and Brian beat me. I should go back and watch that video, I remember him being very competent and actually pushing me around a bit, back at a time when nobody pushed anyone around.

Within a few weeks we were poker buddies, chatting on AIM and the CR message boards. Brian started to work his way into the cash games and pretty quickly moved up to the $1knl+ games. Although I'm sure Brian would say that CardRunners helped him, he's one of the more "natural" poker players I have met. He's a sharp kid that has a pretty strong understanding of how other people are thinking and trying to win in a given game. It was no surprise to me that Brian moved up to the bigger games on the internet by 2006, and I still remember the first time he told me he was learning PLO. I told him I thought it was cool but that I didn't see a reason to because of how much money you can make at NLHE. Heh, I might have been wrong there, just goes to show how easy it is to be VERY wrong about something even when would consider yourself an expert on the subject.

Another funny Brian Hastings story is when we all first met him in person over the summer of 2007. Brian had just finished his freshman year of college and was going to fly to Vegas (as a 19 year old) to hang out with a bunch of 21-23 year old poker players. He told me "I can probably come, but my dad needs to talk to you first." I had a phone call with his dad basically assuring him that I wasn't going to cut him up and put him in a meat locker when he came to Vegas. His father was just doing what any good parent would do, he was making sure I actually existed and that his kid would have a safe place to stay while visiting Vegas. Still, a funny conversation to have, considering I was 22 at the time and I wouldn't have called myself a model of maturity.

Over the years, Brian, Andrew, and many of the other people around the CardRunners community became more than just online poker friends. We've lived together in Vegas for a few summers now, play various fantasy sports games, travel together when we all get spare time, and have become very good "real life" friends. It's just pretty wild to look back and remember when we were both so new to the game, just random kids from middle-class America who happened to see Moneymaker on TV and end out falling in love with poker. Now only a few short years later I'm watching the kid take down the biggest score in the history of online poker, and quite possibly one of the largest in the history of poker. Afterwards getting to chat with Brian about what it feels like to go on the biggest rush anyone has ever seen (note: he said it felt good.), it was truly surreal. This match was more to me than just a friend of mine running hot and playing great to win a lot of money. It really made me think about how far we've all come over the past few years. Two or three years ago, all of the biggest online winners were simple considered "up and coming" players, the type of players who would eventually be the stars of poker's future. We were lucky to get a small article in Cardplayer magazine and there were hardly any websites dedicated to tracking and reporting online results; all anybody ever cared about was live MTT results. For awhile there was no way I could even get someone at the online poker rooms to answer my emails, now they are all very helpful to high stakes online player's requests. I really think Brian Townsend being on the cover of Cardplayer in late 2007 helped changed things, and now you have a guy like Tom Dwan being signed to Team Full Tilt. FTP sponsors 11 CR pros, and many online-only or online-mostly players are getting sponsorship deals. Things have changed in the poker world over the past couple of years, and the fact that two kids so young could square off for so much money while the whole poker world watched really is something else.

I'm just really happy for Brian, but I should also mention Cole and Brian T. because they have all done well in the high stakes games over the past six months or so. I can assure you that those three guys have worked harder on their games than anyone you will meet. I'm sure they would all say they have a ways to go, but to go from not playing anything other than NL to playing pretty much all the games on the internet at the highest level is ANY amount of time is pretty impressive. It took them less than a couple of years, in some of their cases, maybe less than a year. People on the internet love to say disparaging things about successful people, so it sucks reading people saying things such as "they were colluding." First of all, I challenge anyone to try to group play 6 tables of HU PLO against a wild opponent. It would be a death wish. Anyone who watched the match saw how fast the action was, it was hard to keep up with it just watching, much less playing, and even much less, playing and talking about hands. It would be more credible to accuse them of switching off back and forth with who is clicking the mouse, which would be difficult while Brian is going to school in Ithica, New York, and the other two are in California and Washington, DC, respectively. The simple truth is that Brian T. and Brian H. have both worked hard on their games, both had a chance to play Isildur at mega high stakes, both took a shot, and Brian H. was fortunate to come out on top. It could have been anyone that day, it could have been Ivey, Antonius, Zigmund, whomever was fortunate to catch a good run of cards at the tail end of a long Isildur session. Hell, it could have been Isildur, the way he was going, it wouldn't have surprised me to see him win 4 million that night. It wouldn't surprise me to log on tonight and see it happen, either.

In poker, like in the real world, the hardest working, smartest people tend to have the most success. Notice that I said hardest working first, and that's what I think is most important here. These guys have worked harder on their games than anyone I know, and it doesn't hurt that they all happen to be some of the smartest people I know as well. I feel very lucky to have been able to learn about the game from each of them, and even luckier to consider them friends. Do I think that Brian H. ran really hot yesterday? Yeah, he would say the same. What people don't tend to talk about is just how poorly Brian T. ran before him. I don't remember the exact figure but it was something like 2 million below expectation in all-in pots. I'm shocked he was able to keep it together as much as he did, I could not have done that.

I for one hope Isildur sticks around. There is no doubt the kid is extremely talented and has such a tough style to play against. Who knows, I might be sitting here writing a blog post eating my own words after Isildur takes 5 million back from Brian H. or someone else. Either way, I wanted to write a little about what this match meant to me because yesterday was truly a day that I will never forget. I don't think it has really sunk in for Brian H. yet, but his performance, even if he ran just a litttttle hot, was really one for the ages. I can't remember a better six hours I've ever spent glued to my computer screen, thanks to Brian and Isildur, I hope to watch again soon.

Good luck at the tables, everyone.