While most professional poker players are known by their real names, even when they’re playing online, one player to hit the scene recently, isn’t revealing much. His nickname is Isildur1, and he’s been very active in the online scene. Tuesday night, Isildur1 was playing online with Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan, and Brian Townsend and he was doing great, but along came Brian Hastings, and that was the end of the good times for Isildur. Isildur, who is believed to be Swedish, kept playing, but Hastings finished the session $4.2million ahead.

According to information available about the poker website, Full Tilt Poker’s, and those who have played against Isildur, this puts him about $1.59 million down. Fans shouldn’t worry, though. One of the rumors as to Isildur1’s identity say that he is soccer player Henrik Larsson. Others suggest he is Viktor Blom, a high stakes player who usually frequents the European-only online poker rooms.

What is certain is that he is now down some serious cash and has been inactive for the past few days. There is a question as to whether there was wrongdoing involved on the part of Hastings, Brian Townsend, and Cole South. According to posts on Hastings’ blog, Townsend and South shared information with him about previous hands they had played with Isildur1. This is in violation of Full Tilt’s terms of service, where it clearly states: “Players are not permitted to use the hand histories for hands that they have not personally participated in. Software designed to collect hand history information from games that the player did not participate in is prohibited. Some specific examples include: community shared hand histories and exchanging hand histories with a friend.” It remains to be seen what Full Tilt will do with this admission.

Mike Kosowski is a retired NYPD detective who got anything but a bad beat this month. The retiree has been through a lot. On September 11th, 2001, he was part of a team which tried to help survivors escape the Twin Towers between the time of impact and the time of collapse. When the South Tower collapsed, Kosowki was thrown into the air, suffering multiple injuries.

He retired less than three years later, and took up an interest in online poker. He played PokerStars.net’s freerolls, and placed high enough to be eligible for a place in their Million Dollar Challenge show. With some help from his son and daughter, he submitted a video interview to YouTube and was accepted to play.

He and his wife had to delay an anniversary party that they had been planning for him to play, but he, his wife, and his daughter, flew to Las Vegas for the taping. His son, 15, couldn’t miss school and was unable to join them.

When it came time to tape, none of the contestants in his game managed to beat the celebrity contestants they were up against, so an off-stage game was played and Koswski managed to beat the other three contestants. Then he went up against contestants from the previous three shows.

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Luck was with him, and even though he mucked some good hands along the way, the former detective managed to beat the other three players and soon it was just him and Daniel Negreanu in the final. Kosowki managed to walk away from the table one million dollars richer!

Earlier this year Tom “durrrr” Dwan issued an open challenge to all poker players: to play him heads up at Pot Limit Omaha on 4 simultaneous tables, for 50,000 hands, to be played at Full Tilt Poker. The buy in for this was set at half a million dollars. At the end of this epic game, whichever player was up, by even a cent, would take the $1,000,000 pot.

To add incentive to this, and to underscore his confidence, Dwan added a million of his own money as a side bet on the game – if he is defeated, the winner will get his extra million. It was an enticing prospect, but it took a while for players to start responding. Eventually they did, and the first to step up to the plate was Patrik Antonius.

The game hasn’t been running as smoothly as you might expect. Both Dwan and Antonius make their income from nosebleed stakes poker at Full Tilt’s most elite tables, and so their attention tends to drift when big fish are about. The end result is that although the challenge is more than half complete, we haven’t seen action on it in weeks.

But all that changed last night when the two locked horns again for the first time in almost six weeks. It was a cracking session that took them more than 500 hands towards their target, with some spectacular play on both sides. Overall, Antonius managed to take back almost $70,000 from Dwan, reducing his lead to a little over $700,000. We’ll keep you updated as the challenge progresses and more on real money poker sites.