More likely he just took a break to calm himself and get his mind right.

Poker is intensely psychologically draining and the biggest enemy of winning poker players is tilt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_%28poker%29

Most good players will constantly asses their play for signs of tilt and when they spot it, stop and take steps to address it before continuing.

Learning to recognize when I'm going on tilt has been one of the most important processes in my becoming a better poker player. I found that underplays threw me off my game far more than anything else, so I've worked hard to take my chances when I get them, and quickly move past it when I don't. It wasn't until I lost about $10 (mind you, my bankroll was $20) after getting nothing out of a straight flush that I realized how much such things affected me, and took steps to address it.

Obviously there's a huge difference between $10 and a few hundred thousand dollars, but the same core concepts apply. It's difficult for people who haven't played a decent bit of poker (even at very low stakes) to understand how psychologically draining it can be, and how much the player's frame of mind affects the game.

It's kind of hard to bait and switch repeatedly over the number of hands this guy was playing. I think the number 10,000 hands was floating around in the article somewhere, for one match alone. And at the highest stakes players' edges are pretty thin. It's foolish to think that

a) you have a significant and consistent edge over most other high stakes players (Tom Dwan, Brian Townsend, Patrick Antonius, etc.),

b) those players would be fooled repeatedly by bait and switching without adjusting their game, and

c) you could run such a strategy successfully without having ever played those players at those stakes online before.

I highly doubt this. Have you ever hustled? It's extremely hard to hustle the hustlers. He was playing the top players in the entire world, not some fish filled pond in Atlantic City.

I'm responding to teh report of how things went down, no I haven't ever hustled, have you? When I tasted online poker I could only ever end about 3rd hand in the competition when top 2 were winners; never played for money online.

It's next to impossible to hustle someone in poker regardless. You can only misrepresent your skill for a very short period of time before the losses become too great to overcome. In most cases you'll never be able to setup a huge bet to recover those losses. (Especially with capped buy-ins of 100-200bb). Furthermore, since there is still the unknown factor like in the the old 5c-draw scenarios -- you have a 4 of kind him a straight flush etc. you can bet everything and still lose regardless to how skilled you are.

Additionally, luck still plays a huge role in the short term no matter how skillful you are. You can't bluff/draw every hand and win over the long term. I can't lose to you for thousands of hands and then suddenly flip a switch and make it up in one hand. This is where/why the pool/golf/prop etc hustles work.

Poker is really about the long term unless you go on a short streak (such as perhaps Isil did) and get out. Otherwise the skill factor will eventually kick in; Even if it takes 1million+ hands before you can even start talking about the "long term" there is no real way to hustle anyone over that amount of hands. Poker wisdom is: "The long term is REALLY REALLY long."