Ben "Ben86" Tollerene in new Podcast Interview

Written by Pete - Monday, October 12, 2015, Interviews

The latest "must see" highstakes player podcast from JoeIngram1 was recorded last week with none other than high stakes PLO "end boss" Ben "Ben86/Bttech86" Tollerene.

During the exhaustive 3 hour podcast, Ben was very forthcoming in answering a bunch of poker related questions, even giving us some of the high level thinking he practised while on his way to taking down the first ever $51k buy-in WCOOP event last month.

Highlights from the podcast include his opinions on HSDB favourite, Viktor "Isildur1" Blom. During the conversation, Ben says that Viktor is his "vacuum", in that Isildur1 sucks up all the online money when he's on an upswing, then Ben is waiting at the end of the line to take it all off of him!

That's not to say that Tollerene is dismissive of Isildur1's talent, saying that making good BRM decisions and taking the best of it "is not what he's about - he's about gambling as hard as he can against anyone who will play him".

In fact, when probed further, Tollerene offers an interesting insight into Isildur1's contribution and talent at poker (around 16 mins in):

"I couldn't say enough about him, he is a sick, sick player, a brilliant guy. If he approached poker the way that I did, he would have ALL the money. The things he's done by intuition and sheer volume and just competing are amazing. He's figured out so many things, that, I used to think he was just spewing or something, and then eventually I was able to come around to the theory, and he's just got ahead of the game (and) he picks up these theory things by his intuition. LIke, if you made a new poker game... or just a card game and it just released and nobody played the beta or anything, then I would just be all-in on Viktor being the best. His ability to figure out strategy games with no formal studying is mind-blowing, he is an extremely impressive guy."

Isildur1 aside, Tollerene also talks about his rise up from depositing $50 and busting on several occasions to the highest stakes online, his transition to PLO, his life in Vancouver, his new relationship, his impressive lifetime profit graph and his opinion on some of the games brightest stars, including Phil Ivey, Ike Haxton and Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky.

Check out Ben's impressive analysis of the final, decisive hand (see below) in his recent WCOOP Super High Roller victory at 45m into the podcast: