I was intrigued just like everyone else.  An unknown had swiftly risen through the available stakes on Full Tilt Poker to take a seat in “Ivey’s Room,” the highest level on offer at the site.  Every night the player could be found battling heads-up versus Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Tom “durrrr” Dwan, Cole South, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies, Brian Townsend, Brian Hastings and others, the sessions routinely marked by enormous, jawdropping swings of hundreds of thousands of dollars or even more.

I remember in particular railing the games one night in November 2009.  Isildur1 was playing two tables of $500/$1,000 heads-up pot-limit Omaha versus Ivey, four more tables of $500/$1,000 PLO against Antonius, all the while playing in a $25,000 buy-in heads-up PLO tournament, too.  That was the night Isildur1 lost a hand worth $1,356,946.50 to Antonius, the biggest single pot in online poker history.  

All told, Isildur1 would lose an amazing $3.3 million that day.  The player would endure other big losing days, too, while enjoying some big wins as well, particularly versus Dwan from whom Isildur1 reportedly won approximately $5 million during the pair’s sessions.

As the games raged on, so, too, did rumors about Isildur1’s identity.  The player was from Sweden, apparently.  Thanks to that country’s relatively severe tax laws with regard to gambling winnings, Isildur1 was in no big hurry to step forward and become known as anything other than a ninja avatar with a weird name derived from a character in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.  Most speculation pegged the player as young, too, perhaps just 19 years old.

And without exception, the player was thought to be a man.  Just like all of the other players in those high-stakes online games.

Like I say, Jen’s question got me thinking about that assumption, one that was made of Isildur1, but which also is frequently made in poker.  It’s true in poker that when we don’t readily know the sex of a player, we often assume the player to be a he, not a she.

Both Jen and I sometimes report on online tournaments in which we often will not know the identities of players beyond their screen names and avatars.  I admitted to her that often in my reports on these tournaments I will frequently assume a player is male, indicating as much by my choice of pronoun (“he”) to refer to the player.

Not to go out of my way to forgive myself of this peccadillo, but chances are that more often than not such guesses are probably correct.  There are still more men than women playing online poker, and when we look at the highest-stakes games, the percentages tip even further toward there being a high preponderance of men.  Even so, it is always better not to make such assumptions, especially if one can avoid having to do so.

Getting back to the mystery of Isildur1, though, there are other reasons why most instinctively thought the player had to be male.  Even if we had not been influenced by those early rumors identifying Isildur1 as a young man from Sweden, the player’s extraordinarily high tolerance for taking risks with money still would have suggested to most if not all of us that he was a man and not a woman.  

It’s the same prejudice that says girls can’t be gamblers, really.  Especially for high stakes.  

The most obvious comparison I can draw would be to think back some time before to the initial appearance of another online phenom from Scandinavia, for a while known to us only as “Annette_15.”  Her story became all the more stunning for many once it became widely known that the player tearing up all of those multi-table tourneys was not a man at all -- an assumption some actually made despite that screen name -- but was in fact a young girl from Norway.

Obrestad confounded long-held assumptions about women and poker, assumptions that have persisted despite being challenged over and again by many, many examples of top-level women players playing for the highest stakes.  And I do think her example -- along with that of others -- might have at least suggested to us the possibility that someone bursting on the scene the way Isildur1 did need not have necessarily been a man (even if it is probably more likely than not such a player would be).

Jen’s question also invited me to think about another possible response -- namely, to consider what the reaction would be if somehow it had turned out that Isildur1 was indeed a woman.  How would we railbirds following Isildur1’s every move have taken that news?

I think the reaction would be not unlike what we saw happen with Obrestad, although probably accompanied with an even greater degree of astonishment.  Perhaps we’ll find out soon enough when some future “Isildur1” comes around to take on the big boys... and we all move to the edge of our seats, eager to see what she does next.

Also see She Said: If Isildur1 Was a Woman