Many were amused to hear that Jordan Griff, runner-up in last week’s WSOP Main Event for a $6M payday, was back at work on Monday morning. Griff appeared on Doug Polk’s podcast on the weekend, saying “I think I'm just gonna go back to my normal routine and life for a few months”, and confirmed it in a post on Monday morning.
The same can be said for the man who finished the Main Event in third, for $4M, but for Niklas Astedt that doesn’t exactly mean zoom calls explaining his recent absence to his boss. That’s because, as many may have only recently discovered, Astedt is one of - if not the - most successful online tournament players ever.
Another day, another $50K
Using his PokerStars screen name ‘Lena900’ - under which he has accumulated close to $18M in tournament winnings - Astedt hit the ground running in the site’s biggest weekly tournament, the $5,200 Titan’s Event. An exclusive event due to the high buy-in, it attracted 35 unique players and 11 re-entries, including a second bullet for Astedt, and paid the top six places.
After 6.5 hours of play Astedt finished in the runner-up spot for $55,358, losing out to Austria’s Leonard ‘Grozzorg’ Maue who pocketed $80,853 for the win. Also going deep were Alexandros ‘Pwndidi’ Theologis (3rd, $37,902), Juan ‘Malaka$tyle Pardo (4th, $25,951) and Michael ‘imluckbox’ Addamo (5th, $17,768).
And as if bouncing straight back to a big money finish wasn’t impressive enough, fellow pro Patrick Leonard also spotted Astedt playing at GGPoker at the same time.
Astedt played roughly 95 hours to finish third of 10,112 players in the Main Event, winning $4M for an hourly win rate of around $42K. His return in the Titan’s Event was closer to 'only' $8.5K per hour.
Oh well, back to the old routine…
