The 15th inductee is Taylor Caby, a name which was bound to appear on the IPWOF eventually. Caby's contribution to online poker is hard to ignore. Playing under the screen name "Green Plastic" in the Ultimate Bet glory days he quickly established himself as the dominant heads-up NLHE player of his day (2003-2005) after taking on and crushing the previous "end boss" Prahlad "Mahatma" Friedman in a series of engrossing high stakes matches.
Not content with making himself a poker millionaire Caby, along with his University of Illinois frat buddy Andrew "Muddywater" Wiggins, he co-founded Cardunners.com in 2005, which quickly grew into the world's largest poker training site, bringing in millions of dollars a year in revenue and producing hundreds of training videos by some of the biggest names in online poker which included the likes of Brian "$tinger 88" Hastings, Brian "aba20" Townsend, Daniel "jungleman12" Cates, Doug "WCGRider" Polk, Phil "Mr Sweets28" Galfond and many others.
Caby also co-founded fantasy sports site DraftDay, before selling the business in 2014.
Next up is amateur poker player, philanthropist, and billionaire entrepreneur Guy Laliberte. While Guy never set the online poker world alight by crushing souls and busting bankrolls, he certainly helped to fuel the highstakes mayhem of the nosebleeds throughout the late 2000's. The nature of the Cirque Du Soleil founder's "fuel" was the approximately $31m he is thought to have lost at the virtual felt of Full Tilt and PokerStars across a variety of screen names including (allegedly) "noataima", "lady marmelade", "patatino", "Zypherin", "Esvedra", and "elmariachimacho". Full tables of 6max $500/$1000 NLHE were a regular feature during Laliberte's time at the tables with the likes of Phil Galfond, Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, the Dang brothers, and John Juanda circling the whale infested waters for a tasty chunk of billionaire cash.
As well as his online "donations", Laliberte is also a poker hero for his charitable work at the live felt, organising the big buy-in "One Drop" events which resulted in millions of dollars going to his charitable foundation which funds resources to providing access to clean, safe, water.
I doubt they'll be any complaints as to the 17th inductee, the one and only Viktor "Isildur1" Blom. Anybody who has followed high stakes internet poker over the last 7 years or so will be perfectly aware of Viktor Blom.
Having spent a little time dabbling with STT's and ring-games, the Swedish phenom finally realised that heads-up NLHE was his forte, and literally within weeks he had charged through from low-stakes to the highest stakes available on several European networks, earning a healthy seven-figure bankroll in the meantime.
Regs on 2+2 started talking about this unknown newcomer "blom90" around the beginning of 2009 who turned $2k into $1.8m in two weeks and was beating allcomers at a whole host of sites including Svenska Spel, iPoker, Cake, Entraction etc. Eventually an unknown Swede turned up at Full Tilt under the screen name "Isildur1" and quickly moved up from $10/$20 and $25/$50 to playing $500/$1000, where he duly took the reigning internet NLHE God Tom "durrrr" Dwan for $5m in a matter of days. Obviously Isildur1 had a bucket-load of talent, but even more obviously he had no bankroll management. Playing 9 tables of $500/$1000 HU PLO and NLHE simultaneously against Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and Tom Dwan is not a good bank-roll choice, but damn it was exciting stuff! Check out the biggest online pots ever played and you'll notice Isildur1 being involved in every one!
After multiple seven-figure swings, the inevitable happened in spectacular fashion as Isildur1 lost $4.2m in one session, 6 tabling Brian Hastings at $500/$1000 PLO (a game he'd only recently started playing) and it looked like the end of Isildur1. However, as we now know, Viktor Blom is a resourceful chap and over the past few years has had several quick-fire multi-million dollar upswings, and some spectacular downswings. We're happy to say he's still in action and no doubt that next multi-million dollar rush is lurking just around the corner!
