Victor Ilyukhin Sr. wins the Grosvenor United Kingdom Poker Tour opener in London after defeating the Sky Poker UK Poker Championships Main Event Champion, Alex Spencer, in heads-up action.

It’s not often that I am happy to see a larger than life Russian staring out of my computer screen, whilst I chow down on my scrambled eggs, but I’ll make an exception for Victor Ilyukhin Sr.

I absolutely adore the fella.

But it wasn’t always like that.

At first I thought he was a right pain in the ass.

I had seen Ilyukhin on the World Poker Tour (WPT) on many occasions. He stood out because my wife owns Revive Touch and Ilyukhin would hire a masseuse to work on him most of the day.

After Ilyukhin was eliminated he would pull up a pew, next to his son, and watch him play until he was also eliminated. I never had the need to place either of them into my chip counts. Then, one day, Ilyukhin started to grow a stack worthy of mention. Then his son did likewise. As I went to enter them into the back-end of the WPT blog I realized that they both have the same first and last names: Victor Ilyukhin.