Did Phil Ivey freeroll high stakes games against Trueteller?

Trueteller with harsh accusations against Phil Ivey

Timofey “Trueteller” Kuznetsov is unhappy with a story that Phil Ivey freerolled him on a crossbooked highstakes match, despite the Russian pro posting all the details of it himself last year.

Kuznetsov at the time claimed of Ivey: “He never paid most of the money he lost, and for the past few years he has had serious problems, at least with liquidity.”

The story seems to have been largely missed by the English language poker press until now, but it tells of how Trueteller learned extra poker variants to specifically target Ivey.

The match was played at$100/$200 NLHE on Pokerstars and cross-booked for 10x the amount according to forum posts this week on 2plus2.

Ivey targeted by Trueteller

Trueteller initially explained why and how he focused on Ivey in a post last year on the well-known gypsyteam.ru forum:

‘In 2014, after the action in 6max NL subsided, and Gus and Samrostan lost the rest of their online bankrolls in 2-7 limit, the question arose before me: with whom to play big now?

‘The biggest potential opponent online was Ivey, but he didn’t play me in NL and 2-7, and I wasn’t able to play other games myself. I had a plan: to learn to play 8 games good enough in a year to start a match with him without being a big underdog…’

That, Trueteller believed, would ‘make it difficult for him to quit playing against a young, inexperienced opponent in the mix, in his best discipline.’

By October 2015 Trueteller felt he was ready for Ivey, and thus began what he describes as “the most interesting fight in my life.”

Massive online battle saw 1000% crossbook

Eight-hour sessions of $100/$200 playing NLHE and PLO soon skyrocketed from an initial 200% crossbook (where the extra money is paid off the books) up to 1000%.

As Kuznetsov recalls, “It was the third week of the match, we played for 25-35 hours in a row, slept for 10 and started again, by that time crossbook was already 10x and was 15 buy-ins up.”

Trueteller then shares an amazing hand he lost, perhaps the biggest in online history given that the crossbook turned the actual stakes into $1k/$2k.

Kuznetsov then explains: “This is the most emotionally charged pot I’ve played in my career, and Ivey’s surrender by then was a matter of time. He never paid most of the money he lost, and for the past few years he has had serious problems, at least with liquidity.”

Ivey’s downfall costs $millions

Those problems have been covered extensively on these pages, Ivey’s infamous edge-sorting cases costing him $millions, with lawyers for the Borgata even turning up to confiscate his WSOP winnings last year.

As we revealed earlier this summer, Ivey seems to have settled the $10million Borgata case but it appears other debts, to Kuznetsov for example, may still be out there.

‘No freeroll’ claims Kuznetsov

The Russian, however, was hoping that the public discussion would simply go away and thinks the ‘Ivey was freerolling him’ claims by some are off the mark.

“Hey guys, I don’t think Phil was freerolling me, some unfortunate series of events happened to him. He is in touch with me and I’d prefer this topic not to be discussed in public. If it’s possible to close/delete this thread I would appreciate it.”

Of course, deleting a thread based on Kuznetsov’s own admissions seems a rather fanciful idea, and Ivey was already in the hot seat when Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates and Ilya Trincher claimed to have backed him.