One of the things that poker fans have begun to miss the most were the headlines about the nosebleed stakes where the top poker players would win and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in just the span of a few hands. Those days seem like they belonged to a different dimension, a different era where the Black Friday incident hadn’t even been imagined yet. In a recent poker session, Phil Galfond and Isildur1 provided a very pleasant and very welcome interlude to all the doom and gloom headlines about online poker these days.

The Upward Climb

Even though everyone in the poker industry is pretty much focused on the proceedings of Full Tilt Poker and the results of the attempts to pass an online poker bill In the US, poker still has not stopped. There might be legal battles taking place everywhere, but ultimately, people are still flocking to poker rooms online. High stakes games are still happening, though they’re beginning to attract far less attention. But sometimes, when the headlines involve such big names as Viktor Blom and Phil Galfond, people just can’t help but take a minute of their time to watch.

Blom was playing at the high stakes tables like he usually was, pretty much taking the tables by storm, winning more than $500k over the weekend. By Sunday, he was raking in the dough and had begun to look unstoppable. But then he clashed against Phil Galfond, and that was where his downswings began.

The Decline

Blom and Galfond were playing $100/$200 Pot Limit Omaha games at the Pokerstars high stakes tables this week, with Blom hoping to get back at Galfond for all that he had lost at their previous $25/$50 Pot Limit Omaha session earlier. However, Galfond soon showed that it wasn’t just luck that he won against Blom. Pretty soon, Blom found that he was down by $425,000. Blom’s other games weren’t going too well either. By the end of all his sessions, he was down by $600,000.

If anything, by this win, Galfond pretty much proved that moving to Canada is a great idea for any pro who can manage to do it. Online poker is still profitable, and it’s still exciting, it’s still fun. The air just has to be cleared first for everything to go back to the way it once was again.