Viktor Blom doesn’t need 2,500 hands to defeat Daniel Negreanu
Viktor Blom
It took Viktor "Isildur1" Blom less than four hours and only 1,500 hands to relieve Daniel "KidPoker" Negreanu of $150,000 in the latest SuperStar Showdown.
The online, over-hyped challenge that was the meeting of the old and the new of world poker, the face-off between Blom and Negreanu that took place last Sunday night, was not the epic battle most expected, or hoped, it would be.
The series of Showdowns that are organized online by these two players’ sponsor, PokerStars, usually consists of a heads-up match consisting of a single session of 2,500 hands that is played across four tables of No Limit Hold'em and Pot Limit Omaha with high stakes – at stakes no lower than $50/$100. The winner is the player that shows either a profit after 2,500 hands, or wins all of their opponent's match bankroll. The Blom-Negreanu affair is to be played across two occasions, presumably for maximum exposure for the ‘site.
Blom only needed 1,500 hands to walk away with Negreanu’s $150,000 in the first session and never really let the old guard warrior get any headway in the match. The Swede dominated the confrontation, taking no prisoners with a number of huge hands and an even larger number of "sick" (in his words) hands that ran all the way to the river or threw him help on the turn. All who witnessed it, including Blom himself, had to admit that Negreanu ran a very bad line during the match.
The bad news for Daniel Negreanu is that he has agreed to return to the same spot this coming Sunday in the second and final round of this special face-off between the two high-stakes pros. The 1,439 hands the first sit-down took made up the shortest of these Showdowns to date. Blom lost the first to Isaac Haxton but then defeated Tony G, Daniel Cates and Eugene Katchalov before accepting Negreanu’s challenge.
Negreanu practised extensively his multi-tabling skills against some of these former Blom oppenents but his online training didn’t count for much.
