^^ hopefully with subtitles very soon

really like the 1st episode

Yeah I really like this song too. The lyrics make no sense whatsoever in Finnish either, so you're not missing out on much, but they have a really contagious vibe. I'm not 100% sure but if I had to guess, I'd say JVG are probably *the* most popular Finnish act nowadays in terms of streams and whatnot. I actually went to school with one of the two main dudes and he used to date my neighbor.


The second episode (part 1 of a double episode with Patrik Antonius) should have English subtitles within a few hours!

15 years on, is this (0:07) finally the confirmation by the man himself that Patrik was in fact playing on the "TiltMeNot" account in this legendary blood bath?

TiltMeNot to my knowledge (not 100% sure tho) was Bengt Sonnert. I have no idea why someone named that clip as Lodden vs. Antonius, given it very likely wasn't Patrik.

We actually show a few seconds of that same clip in episode 2, and I'm already regretting it since it might give people the idea that's actually Antonius. Maybe it was, but it really wasn't our place to make that visual statement, although this was an honest mistake on our part. It's just that there really wasn't anything else available that wasn't copyright protected that fit what Patrik's talking about at all, and we wanted to add that sweet b-roll for the viewing experience (those who started in the 2010s or 2020s could see what the biggest games in the world looked like back then).

But yeah, we didn't talk about his old screen names at all. I went through some old Finnish news archives just now, and about half of them say that TiltMeNot was Antonius and half that it's Sonnert. My hunch says that the odds of TMN having been Antonius are much lower than 50% tho.

Oh well. Luckily we show the actual Patrik as I_KNOCKOUT_U like 40 seconds later, so at least we didn't drop the ball completely.

Without further ado, here's episode 2!

The Prince of Monaco (pt. 1)

Synopsis:

The first episode was intentionally targeted at mainstream audiences, but this one is almost entirely just poker fireworks. I don't want to spoil it too much tho -- just watch the episode and let me know your thoughts



If the subtitles don't work in the embed, just watch it on YouTube and press c or click the cog icon.

There will be another 30-ish minute Patrik episode next week. This one is more poker-centric of the two for sure, so if there's one episode of this show you're going to watch, I'd say make it this one.

These are excellent. Really enjoyed hearing Patrik speak about his journey in detail.

From what I read, TiltMeNot was obviously Sonnert's account, but speculation was rampant that it was Antonius who was playing on the account in this specific session. I don't think it's particularly likely given that Patrik doesn't strike me as a person that would tilt away 20 buy-ins for no reason, but hey, nvg is going to nvg.


Only god (or maybe Nick Rainey) knows how many screen names he used that nobody knows about. Multi-accounting wasn't exactly frowned upon in the old days, and Patrik made it an art form. Except for the one time of course where he was stupid enough to play Phil Galfond heads-up on the red pro account of Roland De Wolfe haha.

I for one will never forget this session ...



From what I remember, IDreamOfJenna basically put Patrik on monkey tilt. Then again, IDreamOfJenna went busto some days after that while Patrik is still the biggest legend in the history of Online Poker (except maybe for Isildur1, who also happens to be busto), so clearly none of this mattered one bit.

Awesome, I'm really happy you've been enjoying the ride! The second part of the Patrik episode has some pretty spicy quotes about Isildur, Hastings and Ivey

Ahhh yep, thanks for clarifying the TiltMeNot speculation, that was just before my time. I was around for the IDOJ session tho, he's the one legendary figure in the Finnish poker scene who's managed to conceal his identity from the public for all these years. Songs are still sung about his heroic bluffs 15 years later, what an epic player he was.

Re: All the oldschool multi-accounting -- I don't want to discuss this in relation to Patrik specifically, because 1) I have no information whatsoever about that anyway, and 2) I think that would be a shitty thing for me to do given what a gigantic favor Patrik did for us and how open he was about everything.

But as someone who's been around the Nordic poker scene since about 2007, I've seen a lot of stuff go down, and you're absolutely spot on about MAing not being frowned upon at all back in the day. I know a lot of the Nordic crushers in general were swapping accounts, and it was considered a part of the game that you had to try to figure out who you were actually playing on that day. Lots of people had shared accounts as well and to my knowledge this was widely accepted. The only reason I'm not naming any names is because I don't think 2021 people would understand and I don't want to cause any drama, but my honest opinion is that there was very little wrong with this given the rules / climate back in the day. It's up to the sites to decide their policies, and if they choose to allow MAing, then it's not really our place to hate on the players for doing it.

I've also witnessed lots of crushers from all corners of the world play on second accounts that the general public doesn't know about, because they've needed to drop down in stakes and they were embarrassed to be seen playing lower. FTP especially was not only lenient about this, but to my knowledge actually encouraged MAing, and if you were a well-known high stakes player you could create as many accounts as you wanted to and then just email their VIP support to raise your limits, letting them now that account Z is in fact player X playing on his 8th alias. Pretty shady but hey, welcome to 2009. If we're going to condemn everyone who did it when it was widely accepted, the hypothetical online poker HOF would look very different.

Again I'd like to emphasize that none of the above has anything to do with Patrik specifically - I had only met him once and very very briefly before this documentary. Like you said, NVG is gonna NVG, but if you ask me, MAing 15 years ago when it was actively encouraged by the sites isn't something we should hold against the players who did it.

PS. We did discuss IDOJ with Patrik a bit, but we ended up cutting it from the documentary as none of it was that interesting and it seemed too offtopic (most viewers have no idea who IDOJ was). I can't remember what he said exactly, but from what I recall he seemed to fondly remember battling against IDOJ as he would put you in crazy tough spots and it was always a challenge.

The overall vibe I was left with after we wrapped up Patrik is that Patrik just really, really loves the game and appreciates the challenge he's gotten from all the tough players over the years. He didn't strike me as the kind of predatory type who only cares about winning the most $$$ possible at all, I think it means a lot to him to be able to beat the best even if there was a better game available against softer opponents.

i don't know about that...

Heh, I had forgotten about this. I actually wrote one of the articles about Townsend when that story was breaking through.

But this is super weird because that's just not in line with what I witnessed at all. I'm trying to rebuild the timeline in my head but it's just been so very long... but what I *think* happened is that most of the stuff I witnessed was closer to Black Friday, maybe around 2009 or 2010 (~2 years after the Townsend case). So maybe they only started to allow MAing once they had gotten more shady in general? Maybe they threw Townsend under the bus to save face even though he was far from the only one? I really don't know / can't remember.

Edit: Another thing that comes to mind is that I don't think that many people realize how the high stakes online cash games evolved over the years (we tried our best to explain some of this in the Patrik episode). Up until ~2007 ALL high stakes cash games were on a European network called Prima. They had 200/400 when the next biggest game anywhere was like 25/50. Prima was a network with over 50 skins, which is a network model not most Americans are at all aware of. PokerStars, FTP and Party were standalone sites, but Prima was just the network and you could play there on Ladbrokes or Unibet or Bet365 or whatever. So it was actually everyday stuff to create a new alias when all these sites were competing for players, and if you wanted to play high stakes under a concealed identity, you could create 50 different aliases using 50 different skins.

Then, when FTP came around, it was the first site offering true high stakes games that didn't have this in-built functionality of creating multiple aliases using different skins. Even though this sounds a bit naive now, I honestly don't think all that many people who moved there from Prima even realized there was anything wrong with changing aliases.

So yeah, if I had to guess, I'd say it probably went down like this: All the high stakes players from around the world moved from Prima to FTP with the culture of using a gazillion screen names being normal and widely accepted. They brought the practice with them to FTP, who at the beginning were either too incompetent to notice, didn't care or secretly encouraged it to make sure they got all the big names playing there. Then sbrugby got caught, which was bad because he was a part of their then-relatively-small (?) pro team, so they had no other choice but to make him a scapegoat. After that it was either business as usual, or maybe they actually did ban MAing for a while until Bitar and the other shady ****s got greedy closer to BF and decided to allow it again.

But yeah, I'm going to stop this derail here, because no matter how much NVG loves oldschool dramabombs, I don't want to have this stealing the limelight from our positive little documentary about Nordic crushers

Wow thanks so much as So Many memories from just railing days.

Your work and finished product is Gold, look forward to more episodes.

4 years with Zero losing months!

10 out! Of 10 Sir T Y.

Excellent watch, thanks for making!

Awesome stuff, thanks!

Love these. Thank you!

Watched the first two and loved them. Thanks for doing this!

love it! thanks for doing this!

Thanks guys, it's comments like this that keep us going

Dan had dinner with Ziigmund the other day and sounds like the legend is in for a proper Ziigmund special episode

Ziggy's thread needs at Bump ��
Can't wait to watch. T Y.

Looks great. I will definitely be watching all these episodes.

When is the next episode

Episode 3 will be released tomorrow (in Finnish). English subtitles should be available by Monday. Episode 4 will be out before Christmas as well.

In the 3rd episode the main focus is on Patrik's FTP years, with an emphasis on Isildur, Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan. It was pretty cool to hear Patrik talk about his most famous opponents and matches in detail.

We just got officially renewed for season 2, with filming scheduled to start in February (covid permitting). We'll be doing our best to bring you Ziigmund's full story, as well as the story behind the world's biggest online winner over the last few years for starters.

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

Who dis? There's someone who's been universally recognized as the biggest online winner?

Not revealing this yet, and it's certainly possible the name I have in mind may not actually be the biggest winner -- depends whether +$20M or so over the last 3-4 years is enough for the top spot or not. Should at least be pretty close.