Haxton is considered one of the top online cash game specialists and plays under the aliases, Ike Haxton, luvtheWNBA, and philivey2694 where he has earned over $2,000,000. Although successful in tournament play, he prefers online cash games and considers them to be his specialty. Ike Haxton Biography The son of a poet and psychiatrist, Haxton showed a high level of intelligence from an early age, playing chess at the age of four and competing in Magic: The Gathering at the age of ten. Isaac Haxton is calling for Las Vegas poker players to stop playing live games due to increased COVID-19 cases in Nevada. Nearly 1% of all Nevadans tested positive for the virus in the past week.
Total life earnings: $27,670,939. Latest cash: $24,886 on 30-Aug-2020. Click here to see the details of Isaac Haxton's 128 cashes.
Ike Haxton is sometimes referred to as the 'Harry Potter of the poker world'. He earned that name not only due to his looks but also because of the fact that there's indeed something magical about his game. At first glance Haxton's resume might not look that impressive, he has no WSOP bracelets, EPT and WPT titles to his name, but he final tabled all of those prestigious tournaments and if we combine that with his impressive high roller results we get more than $13,000,000 in tournament winnings, which earned Ike the place in the top 30 on the all-time money list.
Haxton is also an accomplished cash game player. He was one of the main players who popularized the idea of game theory (to the point that Ike's 'GTO Dream Machine' became a meme of sorts), he's also a genuinely good guy who cares about the long-term health of poker ecosystem and is willing to sacrifice some business opportunities for his beliefs.
Ike is an extremely talented player and his game is certainly worth taking a closer look at.
Meet Isaac Haxton
This hand happened early in Haxton's career but it manages to remain one of the absolute highlights of it even after all these years. First of all, the hand was played in the head's up of a major tournament which already made the stakes much higher than in most other context and when we add to that two players with the levels of aggression way ahead of their times we get a really spicy concoction. We'd think that this set-up couldn't be improved further but one look at luscious locks of Haxton waving freely in the air quickly proves us wrong.
The preflop started in a fairly increase manner with a limp by Ryan followed by a check from Haxton. The flop containing two high cards was most likely the main reason for what ensued later in the hand. When we discuss the big hands from the annals of poker history. one of the common theme connecting many of them is a board texture that doesn't go well with player's preflop action. What I mean by that, is that while it's very easy to represent a wide variety of strong hands on an AQx board when you open raised from UTG in a 6-max game, it's much harder to tell the same convincing story when you completed the small blind in a head's up match. It was still not unreasonable for Ryan to bet the flop but, the seed of doubt was already planted in the mind of any perceptive observer, Ike Haxton most certainly included.
After Isaac floated the flop, we got a fairly uneventful turn, but it's important to point out that King was another card that shouldn't really hit either player's range given their preflop action and the fact that Ryan didn't continue his aggression on the card that should hit his flop betting range made him severely capped in this spot. Ike correctly recognized that and made a very good bluff on the river, however, Ryan wasn't done with the hand and made a really bold move by going over the top.
This play would've probably worked against many lesser players but Haxton knew exactly how flawed his opponent's story was from the start of the hand and he went over the top with the worst starting hand in poker making this bluff the one for history books.
Spell Slinging with the Magician
Turns out that going over the top in bit pots might be Haxton's favorite thing to do in poker. He's also good at picking up on slight inconsistencies in his opponent's ranges even when they are considerably harder to spot than in the example that we've discussed before. Taking a bet/3bet flop line after a preflop 3bet on a 78x board with a flush draw might be risky against many players, but there are two major factors why it proved to be a great play in the context of PokerStars Big Game.
First of all, Antonio Esfandiari is a very tight player, to begin with, and given the format of the show (recreational player in the game) he was even more likely to remove from his range the hands that aren't good at making top pair type hands. In other words, Esfandiari should be somewhat broadway heavy in this spot and Ike was also blocking some number of draws with his king of hearts.
It was, of course, possible for Antonio to show up in this spot with 77 or 88 but if we look at his entire range he might have real trouble staying balanced in this spot when he raised and that's what Ike so brilliantly punished with his cbet/3bet line.
Winning the Battle and the War
Any high roller tournament pro worth his salt should be good at reading table dynamics and using his stack to put maximum pressure on his opponents. This is doubly true for an exceptional player like Haxton and he shows that off perfectly in this hand against Mike 'Timex' McDonald.
The flop play in this example was especially important. Haxton went for a relatively modest raise in order to set his stack up perfectly for a slight overbet on the turn, putting tremendous pressure on his accomplished opponent with a solid amount of equity Neverland casino slots reviews. in case anything went wrong.
This hand might not be as flashy as the bluff that makes Ike famous, but because of that, it's also a slightly better representation of what it takes to thrive in an extremely competitive environment of high stakes tournaments and cash games.
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Posted by Ellis Shuman, May 19, 2014
Brooks Haxton, who teaches writing at Syracuse University, has published six collections of poems and two books of translations from the ancient Greek. He is also the father of Isaac 'Ike' Haxton, who realized his childhood dream of playing the game of poker for a living to become one of the hottest names in online poker, as well as earn more than $8 million at live tournaments.
Three days after Isaac was born, the tiny infant nearly died and was in desperate need of a total blood transfusion. As the doctors described the risks, Haxton's 'helplessness felt something like a trance.' His wife, a nursing teacher and third-year medical student, suggested an alternative treatment, convincing the doctors to go with her plan to 'exchange half of Isaac's blood for an equal volume of saline to dilute the bilirubin.' The doctors agreed, and miraculously, Issac's life was saved.
'We played the cards as they were dealt,' Haxton wrote of the experience, in an article that appeared in the New York Times last month. His wife 'happened to have the presence of mind and the expertise to play them with great skill, and we got lucky.'
Haxton relates the full story of his son's life, highlighting the early years of his highly successful poker career, in the memoir Fading Hearts on the River (Counterpoint, April 2014). The elder Haxton, who also grew up in a family that played cards, has a knack for riveting poker tournament hand-by-hand reporting, but he also takes the story up a notch, going into a trip of discovery into his son's mindset as he successfully played bluffs or agonized after unpredictable bad beats.
Isaac Haxton, CardPlayer.com
The book opens with Isaac sitting at the tables of the $7,800 WPT Championship Event of the 2007 PS Caribbean Adventure. This would be Isaac's first live cash, after he had already proven himself as a highly skilled online player. Isaac, as described by his father, 'was still uneasy with the differences between the game online, which he had played for three years daily, and the live game, which he had played much less.'
Isaac 'luvtheWNBA' Haxton's story is not told to us in linear, chronological order. Instead, Haxton takes us back and forth to different episodes in Isaac's childhood, giving insights to the development of his son's analytical mind. The young prodigy takes on the game of Magic and masters chess, before finding a home for himself in the world of poker.
The author frequently goes on tangents, sharing with us theories of evolution; the workings of the optical nerve; the representations of dreams; and the sinking of a U-boat in World War Two. He also lyrically describes his son's poker tournaments: 'The challenge is to choreograph a dance of appearances, with a dance of probabilities and a dance of actions.' Only a poet could describe the deal of the cards in this fashion.
Isaac's story is also the story of the boy's love for Zoe, who accompanies him on his career. Standing on the rail while Isaac played could be difficult for his girlfriend, but he concentrated on his cards. 'These last two days, which had been putting Zoe through the wringer, were pure oxygen in Isaac's blood and brain.'
While he did have some minor successes at early live tournaments, Isaac became more widely known in the industry when American officials arrested the two Canadian founders of Neteller in 2007 and seized $800,000 of Isaac's online funds as evidence in the case they were building. Isaac 'was famous now … for being the person with the most money confiscated in the Neteller prosecution.' He would later have substantial funds frozen following the U.S. Department of Justice crackdown on online poker sites on Black Friday.
Being the son of a published bard, Isaac was one time referred to as 'the poet's son.' Haxton writes, 'We thought this was funny. [Wife] Francie said that she liked to think of Isaac as the psychiatrist's son. But the point when they mentioned my standing as a poet was not honorific. They found it droll that a card shark's father would pursue work even more improbable than his son's. Making a living as a poet is like making a living at craps. Though hypothetically possible, it cannot, in fact, be done.'
Today, after continued successes at live tournaments in which he has won more than $8,000,000, there is no way that Isaac Haxton could be known as 'the poet's son.' He has developed a strong reputation for himself and is someone to watch, with respect, at the tables.
'We say, it's only a game, and then, to make it interesting, we play for money,' Haxton writes of the game of poker. 'It's only money. Money makes the game a business. It's just business, nothing personal, and besides, that personal stuff, it's all a crazy dream.'
More than a lot of other players, Isaac Haxton is living that dream.
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