Player Update: Isser

So how has Main Event champ Peter Eastgate been running since his $9,152,416 score after this hand?

Well initially, all looked rosy after his PokerStars deal: the Dane finished 6th in the Party Poker Premier League final for $30,000 before taking down the $4,800 Event at January’s PCA for a cool $343,000 to prove that he is no one trick pony by any means.
But before the life-changing events at the Rio he was known as a head-up cash specialist, playing as ‘Isser’ on PokerStars, and that is where he went back to - moving up from $25/$50 to $100/$200 & even $200/$400. At first it went well, taking Eric Liu for 6 figures in early January but it seems things have finally taken a turn for the worse. At the Scandinavian Poker Awards this month, he accepted an award for Best Performance of 2008 but told Poker Listings that poker is not going as smoothly as it was back in November.

"I've had a bad run playing online; I'm kind of losing a lot," he said. "But that's what usually happens to guys who make a big score in a tournament: they run bad in other games."
"I tried to play the highest stakes there is online, but unfortunately I couldn't beat those guys," he said.
"I didn't lose that many buy-ins, but on the other hand I'm not really prepared to risk two, three or nine million dollars just to see if I can beat those guys. It doesn't make sense. So I am admitting that those guys are better than me. I have a negative equity playing in those games, so I am just going to take it down in stakes to where I can beat the competition."

This is probably a wise decision, as according to Poker Table Ratings he has dropped some serious cash to some of the world’s best: more than $250,000 to ‘Hold_emNL’ (aka Tom Dwan) being the main leak (and over $80,000 to ‘MrSweets28’, the Stars alias of Phil Galfond). And to make it worse, according to who you believe Eastgate could be forking out a significant chunk of ‘that’ $9million to the Danish government in taxes: he has apparently moved to London to try and rectify this but it remains to be seen whether he will eventually be forced to cough up a large proportion of his 7-figure bankroll.

Don’t feel too sorry for him, though: not many 23 year olds can claim to have tournament winnings of almost $10million and this hand from the European Cash Game shows that he can still play:



We don’t think we have seen the last of ‘Isser’.