Home / Poker News April 2010 / Is Isildur1 Mats Sundin? April fools!!!
Is Isildur1 Mats Sundin? April fools!!!
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2010-04-04 11:52
A couple of days ago a huge news hit the WWW about retired Swedish hockey professional Mats Sundin claiming that he was in fact the illusive Swedish
online poker professional, currently only known by his online moniker: Isildur1. I must admit, I fell for the setup myself, despite being quite suspicious as it was April 1st and all that. It all just looked so darn plausible: all we know about Isildur1 is that he’s Swedish, and this Sundin guy, he’s certainly about as Swedish as it gets. He plays poker, and he has been known to be rather successful at it. Supposedly, he’s been playing a lot online lately too.
We all know not everyone can afford to play at the level Isildur1 does, and to go through the swings he did, but Sundin has that covered too. The guy earned around $25 million during his NHL career alone, so he shouldn’t have problems coughing up around $4 million for Brian Hastings.
The news came with a Youtube video in which Mats Sundin apparently confirmed the fact that he was indeed Isildur1. The vid turned out to be an old Sundin interview though, to which the pranksters attached some phony English subtitles. Several poker news portals picked up the news and made a pretty big deal about it.
The prank was timed perfectly too, make no mistake about it. Tony G had just announced a day or two prior to the deed that the Swedish mystery player had accepted his offer to stake him in
Party Poker’s Big Game IV, and that he was seriously contemplating revealing his true identity. With everything aligning perfectly, the stage was set for a truly efficient prank indeed. The only problem was that – probably in order to seem more credible – the perpetrators had mentioned that Sundin’s agent would make announcement later in the day to confirm the story. That confirmation never came of course.
Apparently, several news portals were set on pulling the same prank and they kind of surprised one another too.
The real story only emerged a couple of days later and I have to say I’m quite glad I didn’t get caught up in the hype of the moment and I didn’t swallow the bait myself. The really fancy story would be though if it turned out Mats Sundin was in fact Isildur1 indeed and the fact that the story was set up to look like a prank was in fact the prank…
