Isaac Haxton: Online Poker Games Right Now Best In History, Thanks To Feeding Frenzy Around One MarkUnknown 'MalACEsia' Brings Out All The Sharks On Full Tilt |
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All it takes is one less-experienced player with a lot gamble — and of course money — to create a feeding frenzy in the high-stakes poker world. That’s what is currently happening now within the Dublin servers of Full Tilt Poker, and at least one high-stakes regular is cashing in.
“The online games in the last two weeks have been bigger and running more regularly than maybe I have ever seen in the history of online poker,” nosebleed regular Isaac
“luvtheWNBA” Haxton told Card Player on Wednesday in Las Vegas.
Haxton said that the sole reason the games have been running is because of one account — “MalACEsia”. According to Haxton, the account is from Macau and there’s a lot of speculation on who it may be, but the high-stakes regulars do not know for sure.
Also, the games have been six-handed $400-$800 no-limit hold’em for one reason only: MalACEsia wants to play that form of poker. Historically, most of the absurd online action has been in heads-up (partly thanks to the emergence of Viktor Blom in 2009), but that’s not what this mark wants to play. Fortunately for high-stakes grinders, it allows more of them to sit down.
So far, MalACEsia has lost more than $1 million in the span of about a month. Despite the losses, Haxton said the person has “clearly played a lot of poker before.”
“He’s not a clueless amateur; he’s just not world-class,” Haxton said. “I think it’s someone who plays a lot of poker over [in Macau] and is…he might even be a professional poker player and just winning a lot of money in the live games in Macau.”
Those games in Macau are rumored to be the juiciest in the world, and sometimes feature the likes of Tom Dwan, Sam Trickett, Gus Hansen, John Juanda, among others.
The largest pot MalACEsia lost this month online was when he got in more than 300 big blinds preflop with the A
K
only to run into the A
A of “Denoking”.
Thanks to the action that MalACEsia has catalyzed, Haxton is having a huge month, According to HighstakesDB, he is up more than $700,000 in June and $1.4 million on the year.
“I’ve been running really well at really big stakes, so that’s always nice,” Haxton said.
Despite the upswing, Haxton decided to step away from the computer for a bit and make a trip to Las Vegas for the WSOP $111,111 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament. He didn’t make it past the first day of play, busting sometime Wednesday night.
“I was tempted to stay in Hong Kong and keep playing online everyday, but this was a really big tournament and a lot of fun, so I was happy to be here [in Las Vegas],” he said.
Haxton said during a break in play that he would hop on a flight back to Hong Kong immediately after he busted in order to jump right back into the web games.
The Syracuse, New York native has been greatly affected — some may consider it victimized — by the moratorium on Internet poker play in the United States, but Haxton has come to grips with this reality and has adjusted to a high-rolling vagabond lifestyle.
“On principle, it really pisses me off that it’s the state of affairs right now…that the U.S. government has decided they need to intervene in this way, but I am perfectly happy living elsewhere, to be honest,” he said. “I like living in Malta, Hong Kong, traveling around. Every time I come back to the States I have more perspective.”
It’s not just a better “perspective” that he has acquired over the past two years or so, but also a greater ability to cope with the swings as a nosebleed poker professional. During his recent travels, he found himself involved in the largest pot of his cash-game career.
Haxton played a “million-Euro” hand in Monte Carlo earlier this year, so he said that if he were to find himself entrenched in a seven-figure online hand it probably wouldn’t obliterate his nerves. “I found myself surprisingly calm during that Monte Carlo hand, so I think I’d be OK (laughs).”
“It helped that I flopped a flush in that pot in question,” he admitted. “That made it more relaxing than say if I was calling down and hoping I was right (laughs).”
Haxton’s mentality would be ideal if the online pots escalate to 2009 levels, a year which witnessed $1 million won and lost with a single click of the mouse.
“A million-dollar no-limit pot could happen online, as we have seen some $500,000 stacks recently,” Haxton said. “But it’s so hard to get in 500 or 600 big blinds each in no-limit hold’em, so I’d say it’s relatively unlikely. We have seen pots in the $500,000 range over the last couple of weeks, and we will definitely see more of those.”
Despite his young age, Haxton has been around poker for about eight years now. However, that length of time isn’t really all that long compared to some other high-stakes gamblers. Haxton is astonished with how far he has come in less than a decade.
“I would never have expected this going back eight years ago,” he said. “I was playing small-stakes limit hold’em in the beginning. It’s completely surreal.”
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