Alexander Kostritsyn – PostflopAction

Alexander Kostritsyn won the 2008 Aussie Millions and is now making a splash in the highest stakes cash games online….

When Westerners think of the best poker players to come out of Russia, the likes of Ivan Demidov, Alex Kravchenko & Nikolay Evdakov usually crop up at the top of most people’s prospective lists. However, the name of Alexander Kostritsyn is usually over-looked despite showing the credentials to be one of the most talented young players in the world, let alone in Russia.

Playing under the Full Tilt alias of ‘PostflopAction’, Kostritsyn was one of the sites biggest winners in January & February 2009, making over $400,000 in the high stakes cash games and putting some of the world’s best players to the sword in the process. Over $280,000 of this has come from the ‘Mixed HA’ games of PLH & PLO (playing as high as $500/$1,000) and almost $100,000 has also been made from the Omaha Hi/Lo games, making him the year’s biggest winner in this game form to date (according to High Stakes DB). In short, the boy can clearly play.

If his name is ringing a bell it is probably because of the 2008 Aussie Millions, when he emerged victorious in the Main Event for a cool $1,450,396 after defeating the great Erik Seidel in heads-up play (see the video below for an outstanding demonstration of aggressive 2-handed tournament play against an all-time great):

This is not his only live success, however, as he went on to cash 6 times in the 2008 WSOP in disciplines ranging from No Limit Hold ‘Em to Omaha Hi/Lo to Seven Card Stud (the latter in which he finished 3rd in the $10,000 Event for $163,372). And to truly prove that he is a man for all varieties of the game, Kostritsyn returned to the Aussie Millions in 2009 and won the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament for a further $67,485.

One of the most interesting stories concerning Kostritsyn came from a Russian forum (translated in Two Plus Two here) – after his friends complained that beating the low to medium stakes online wasn’t as easy as it seemed, he set a challenge of turning a $1,000 bankroll into $100,000 in the space of just one week on Full Tilt. The result? 24 hours later he makes enough to enter the $1k Monday – and takes it down for $89,000 to all but complete the task with 6 days to spare (apparently, the last few $,000 quickly followed from a short PLO session). Regardless of what you think about ‘donkaments’, this is without doubt a brilliant story and testament to the skill of ‘PostflopAction’. (Later in the Two Plus Two thread, Jason ‘JP-OSU’ Potter says of Kostritsyn: “I played w/ him for a while in Aussie… He’s a really nice kid, and plays pretty damn well.”)

Now it seems that the Russian is a fixture in the high stakes cash game action and given his results in 2009, he could be a regular in the nose-bleed games for a long time to come. We thought we would put in a $100,000 pot won versus Ilari ‘Ziigmund’ Sahamies to round off on a good note: