Our Verdict:
By any standard by which you care to measure poker prowess finishing on the final table of the PokerStars Sunday Million is a pretty worthy achievement. You have to grind it out for around 12 hours, mixing it with suck-out artist fish and canny pros alike, and cut through a field of several thousand other competitors.
To do this twice inside a month then must take an awesome talent. And that is what many people on poker forums are saying about a young Israeli player called amichaiKK. At the end of April he finished 9th in the internet’s biggest weekly tourney, taking down $11,520 for his night’s work.
But just three weeks earlier he had done even better, coming in second out of a field of 6,637, for a huge prize of almost $100,000.
That wasn’t even amichaiKK’s biggest cash as at the end of last year he final tabled the $1,000 Limit Holdem event of PokerStars ’ World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). The second to last event of the 2006 series, it drew a field of nearly 700 players who collectively generated a prize pool of $695,000, nearly doubling the $400,000 guarantee.
The tournament lasted just under 12 hours and culminated in a quick chop of the prize pool as the two remaining players, one of them amichaiKK, prepared to go heads-up. Two hands later the game was over, won by a Hungarian player named laurentia. But amichaiKK, having cut himself a nice deal, walked away with a tasty $105k.
Like most young internet ‘phenoms’ amichaiKK prides himself on being one of the most aggressive players you will ever sit down with. On one poker forum there is even a debate about how to deal with this uber-aggression.
A player called Othimua relates how he had raised with Q-J off-suit from late position. With blinds at 100/200 he raised to 600. Showing what he is capable of amichaiKK re-raised to 1,800. Now, most players would probably lay down Q-J off in this situation. But Othimua decided to go back over the top of amichaiKK for all his 8,950 chips, telling the forum:
“The hand before this I had doubled up with KK. If you have never played with amichaiKK before then this play probably seems pretty retarded. You might think so anyways, but whatever. I raised from the button and he reraised me 3x. I thought that he figured that I was just raising because I had doubled through in the last hand. Knowing that he is a very aggressive player and LOVES to reraise preflop I decided to send him a message and come back over the top. He insta-mucks.”
This famed aggression might not have proved so effective with Othimua but it has certainly helped to make him one of the most successful internet poker players around today. Since the beginning of 2006 he has taken down tournament winnings of close to $500,000 and we can expect to see many more major cashes.
He has had some stunning success too in the $100 rebuy tournaments on Stars, often described as the toughest tournament on the net. He finishes on the final table often and has won it on at