Alexander Kostritsyn’s biography

Alexander “joiso” Kostritsyn is famous Russian-speaking highstakes player who started his poker career in 2005. Before poker Kostritsyn was a cybersportsmen and participated successfully in StarCraft and Quake3. Alexander decided to change the game thanks to discussion concerning the perspectives for gamers to turn into the poker players at one of the forum where Russian-speaking professional players including Ivan "Soul" Demidov and Sergei "Asmodey" Ozhigin shared their experience. That time can be called as the beginning of a poker boom among Russian cybersportsmen.

Russian player had quite a confused start of his career. He made his first 10$ deposit into account that was a common account with his friends at Party Poker (everybody invested 10$) and he lost the money like his all friends. Then Kostritsyn made 50$ deposit at the same account but he did it independently without friends. He lost it quickly too. "joiso" decided to use accumulated savings – 150$. Since that moment Alexander started to play thoughtful, began to study and analyze poker game and as a result it produced results. Kostritsyn played Limit Holdem and 1-table tournaments. The first day of his play in a one table tournaments brought him 1 100$ - it was the big money for Russian player at that moment. However, he wasn’t able to save that bankroll and when he lost it, he began to build it again by borrowing 500$ from his mother. Luckily this sum was enough for the player to make a good start and soon he began to earn not thousand, but tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.

Alexander Kostritsyn primarily plays at the expensive cash-tables and his name often appears in the highstakes reports.

Russian player participates periodically in online tournaments, including especially the popular online poker series. Kostritsyn has a title of WCOOP Champion at PokerStars (+269 285$) and winning at FTOPS at FullTilt (+47 475$). Both victories were in 2010. Six-figured prize amount brought "joiso" the 4th place in PLO tournament at SCOOP-2017 (+ 136 850$ with buy-in 10 300$) and 8th place at WCOOP 2015 (+150 000$ with buy-in 5 200$).

Alexander has been playing online since 2006 but his first noticeable winning was in January 2008 when he became a champion of Aussie Millions Poker Championship Main Event. His prize amount was about 1, 45 million dollars. It is the largest and the only 7-figured winning of Kostritsyn in the live events for today.

Interesting facts about Alexander Kostritsyn:

• Kostritsyn was a diligent student in school days but at the second course of University (branch of the Volgograd Polytechnic Institute) he left the study for a poker.
• Kostritsyn read a lot of books when studied poker. The first book was “Theory of Poker” by David Sklansky. According to the player’s words this book changed his thinking in poker.
• Russian player threw down a challenge to Chris Ferguson who built his bankroll from 0$ up to 10 000$ during 9 month by making a bet with him that Kostritsyn would increase his bankroll from 1 000$ up to 100 000$. Talented poker player was able to win this bet ahead of schedule. His bankroll became 5 times bigger on the first day and on the second day it was reached the mark in the amount of 100 000$. Alexander Kostritsyn won the main part of amount (89 000$) in the tournament for 1 000$.
• Russian won over 1 740 000$ in total in the tournaments at PokerStars and FullTilt (according to PocketFives data) and over 8 850 000$ at the expensive cash-tables (according to highstakesdb data).
  The graph of "PostFlopAction" at Full Tilt according to highstakesdb data (including only the expensive cash-games) is as follows:

• The graph of "joiso" at PokerStars according to highstakesdb data (including only the expensive cash-games) in August 2018 is as follows: