What happened
Patrik Antonius says he finished about $1.5 million ahead of Viktor “Isildur1” Blom in their 2009 Full Tilt Poker nosebleed matches. He said so on the debut episode of Jean-Robert Bellande's podcast, Broke Living With JRB, which Poker.org wrote up on October 6. Antonius said he won $3 million the day he won “that massive pot” and lost $2 million back within a couple of days, “but I probably beat him for $1.5 million overall.” Asked how many tables they played, he said, “We played four. It was so crazy those days,” and that he would never do it again.
The pot he means was $1,356,947 at $500/$1,000 pot-limit Omaha on November 23, 2009, the largest in the history of online poker at the time. Antonius won it. Coverage that week had him more than $3.5 million up on Isildur1 over 12,604 hands, a figure from PokerTableRatings.com, one of the sites that tracked those games hand by hand while they were being played. ESPN's poker blog credited another tracking site, HighStakesDB, with following the same matches.
That is the part that has aged oddly. The biggest online games of 2009 were watched on purpose, by strangers, in public, and the number that survives is the one Antonius gives from memory. In 2026 the audience for high-stakes online poker that made news was uninvited: a researcher says a remote-access trojan let someone watch roughly 30 high-stakes players' screens, hole cards included, through compromised poker tools. Jurojin and IntuitiveTables have both confirmed they were compromised.
Why it matters
Those heads-up Omaha games were pioneers in a narrow sense: the first to play for that much in front of that big an audience, with the trackers as the broadcast. The audience came with the territory. The sixteen years since have mostly been spent working out who is allowed to watch, and nobody has finished the paperwork.
