This Sunday the 13th February saw the fourth instalment of the Pokerstars SuperStar Showdown taking place between Viktor “Isildur1” Blom and Eugene Katchalov. When Victor Blom first joined PokerStars as a team member at the beginning of this year (2011), he made a statement to the press saying that Heads-up was his best game; and while we thought it bold at the time, this seems to be the case. Eugene Katchalov’s claim to fame is that he won the $100,000 Super High Roller event at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in January.
He stepped up to the plate to take on this 20 year old Swedish player who seems to quite naturally fit into the description of “poker phenom”. Blom already had two out of three wins under his belt as Isaac “philivey2694″ Haxton met with him first and beat Blom to the finish. Next in line was big mouthed Antanas “Tony G” Guoga, who has been dying to play against Blom; Blom cleaned him up and evened the Showdown score to 1-1. Daniel “w00ki3z” Cates was the next challenger, Blom won once again and now the score was 2-1. This weekend true to form Blom took the prize and the current score in the PokerStars SuperStar Showdown is 3 – 1 for Viktor “Isildur1” Blom.
The PokerStars SuperStar Showdown is similar in a way to the “durrr” challenge however it is a once-off high-stakes event to match challengers specifically against Blom in a face-off. The heads-up match features 2,500 hands played across four tables of no-limit hold’em and/or pot-limit Omaha at $50/$100 or higher; the competitor decides their preference. The winner is declared by the poker player with the most profit at the end of the match. Otherwise he may also felt his opponent in the process. Blom and Katchalov played 4 heads-up tables of no-limit hold’em.
These events are advertised in advance so that fans can logon and watch the action taking place from the online rail so to speak, and they are a well attended series. Judging by Blom’s notoriety, he may well just pay off for the PokerStars sponsorship. What was really strange about his sign-up with Poker Stars was that he was in fact a notorious Full Tilt Poker player.
Although the action got off to a slow start, I am not going to give you a blow-by-blow rundown of the action that did take place. You can find this online at any good poker news site. Let us suffice it to say that after back and forth play – Blom had his timing down well and by the time that the 2 500 hands ran out, even Daniel Negreanu who was on the rail commented ” So this Isildur1 kid might be pretty good afterall 
” Blom took his biggest score in these events to date – $111,750 from Katchalov, and admitted in the chat box that luck had favoured him. Now all we have to do is wait for another date and another challenger – word at the tables is; Daniel Negreanu has now expressed interest!