Looking back on 2009 there will be a lot of cool storylines to follow.  Okay, maybe not cool, but it certainly was a transformative year for the game of Poker and several new players made names for themselves, or continued to make names for themselves in and around the game this year.  In a year where two different networks carried new poker game shows, one with great success the other not so much, and where a studio sportscenter poker show was launched on Fox Sports.NET the fad of poker simply won’t go quietly into the night.

There has been an avalanche of poker players created by Chris Moneymaker’s everyman triumph that was a better script than the plot for most sports movies.   The people came in waves and droves.  Those that stuck around better the game and elevated the skill in so short a time period you could argue there was more innovation in poker theory and poker strategy since 2005 than everything that preceded it.  Each wave of players has brought new strategies and a ready onslaught of better, quicker results.

Examining 2009’s batch of young guns and young ‘uns is proof of the transformation of the poker game to new elevations. 

Isildur1, may not be young, as nobody really knows who the player is, but his recent meteoric star turn battling all the online poker greats at once, is a story so big you can’t discuss poker in 2009 without at least mentioning him.  He’s only been around a little over a month so that tells you the impact he’s had.  Already, one of the most talked about players ever, Isildur turned 60k into millions and soared up the limits to the nosebleed games and promptly started destroying the competition.   These weren’t rank amateurs he was treating like droolers or fish at a tourist casino these were names like Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and Tom Dwan.  To see how respected those guys are check out ESPN’s top 10 players right now. 

Yevgeniy Timoshenko, may have a foreign name, but the Ukrainian born, Seattle, Washington raised younster is not proof of the globalization of the game.  He’s still one of Moneymaker’s kids and is as American as apple pie, ignoring the fact his name is Yevgeniy.  Though, he does walk the tightrope in that theme of 2009, where poker expanded from America’s pasttime to the world’s game.  Adult participation of poker may trump that of any other activity worldwide.  There are constantly studies examining the participation of activities by kids in the U.S. with soccer and basketball at the forefront but other than bowling league stats nobody is really tracking home games.

Back to Timoshenko though.  He earned over $4 million in one year alone.  Combined poker earnings from his prolific online poker prowess and his breakout tournament year the 21 year old crushed the game.  His most notable win for 2.15 million may have been the WPT World Championship in April, he bested a final table that had Scotty Nguyen as an old guard still hanging on and wunderkinds like Shannon Shorr, Christian Harder and Bertrand Grospellier.  Grospellier was probably last year’s breakout star, so perhaps, in this new era of poker the torch is passed from one generation to the next every year rather than every decade.

Timoshenko shined on the online felt winning the WCOOP Main Event and 1.715 million.  The next day as an encore he cruised through the massive field of a 1k Monday for 75k.

Joe Cada, aka the kid, aka the youngest Worlds Series of Poker Main Event Champion is truly representative of the new breed of poker.  He already talks like a seasoned veteran.  We’ve written plenty about that kid.  Sure he had more than his fair share of luck coming back to win the Main Event, but it’s obvious since his poise and maturity carried him to the title as much as that lucky horseshoe lodged somewhere above his knees and below his shoulders.