Cash Review: 2008 comes to a close, Galfond still earning...
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Well, 2008 can be pretty aptly described as the year that online poker went a bit bonkers. Some people will probably remember the days when $50/$100 was the biggest game going and now stakes ten times that are being routinely played by the best players in the world. Brings a tear to your eye…
In the last week of 2008 (it’s also the first week of 2009 but that’s just nitpicking) Phil Galfond managed to squeeze in some extra earnings for the year, making an immense $1.1m playing $500/$1,000 NLHE and PLO. Despite losing around $750,000 on the $500/$1,000 HA tables he made a little over $1,000,000 at NLHE and just over $730,000 at PLO.
Ziigmund thought he’d join in the fun in the dying days of 2008 prior to being released on our TV screens in High Stakes Poker season 5 later this year, setting a new largest stack record having left one of the new $500/$1,000 PLO tables added by Full Tilt with a $1,462,000 stack. His net profit for the session was in the region of $1.1m.
Overall the largest winner of 2008 was unsurprisingly the great Phil Ivey, who played 95,000 hands to show a net profit of $7.54m. Phil Galfond snuck in a close second, earning a tad under $7m in 145,000 hands. Third place was durrrr (I bet you were wondering when he was going to make an appearance) with a profit of $5.36m in 223,044 hands.
Looking forward it seems 2009 is going to be a good year for high-stakes poker. Now there are $500/$1,000 tables for NLHE, PLO and HA. All we need is another French-Canadian multi-billionaire who can’t play to save his life.