What Happened To Brian Townsend
By Friday night, the family said in a statement that the search for Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, 40, and McKean's 8-year-old son, Gideon Joseph Kennedy McKean, had shifted to a 'recovery. Brian Kelly bkelly@ptleader.com. And three from the Port Townsend Police Department. “Everything happened so fast,” she told detectives. “He went outside and he had a gun.
You have probably heard of ghost towns – once vibrant communities that slowly disappeared as local fortunes changed, or quickly abandoned due to disaster or other emergency. Ontario is full of ghost towns, some in the GTA, but few have had the same interesting history of Townsend, which is still populated, though only at a tiny fraction of the city that was intended.
In the 1960s, the provincial government was worried about Toronto’s rapid growth and suburbanization. It had introduced a Metropolitan government for Toronto to direct regional planning, but the suburbs were quickly growing beyond Metro’s borders into York, Durham and Peel Counties. As a result, by the mid 1970s, it had developed a Toronto-Centric Plan directing new growth to established city and suburban centres, a greenbelt (sound familiar?) in which sprawl was to be contained, and created “mini-metro” governments in the areas surrounding Toronto and Hamilton, known as regional municipalities. It also bought thousands of acres of land in Haldimand County with the dreams of creating a new town of 100,000 people, who would be employed at the nearby Nanticoke Industrial Park, which included a state-of-the-art Stelco steel plant, an Imperial Oil refinery, and North America’s largest coal generating station.
Townsend was to be the seat of Ontario’s most rural Regional Municipality, Haldimand-Norfolk, and the regional headquarters was one of the first structures built there. The new city came complete with four-lane arterials, parks and a recreation centre, a seniors’ home, a church, a watertower, and a network of pedestrian walkways. And about 1,200 people did settle into houses that wouldn’t look out of place in contemporary suburbs in Mississauga or Pickering. But nobody else showed up, and Townsend became as successful as that first Greenbelt (now just wide enough for a hydro corridor and a toll expressway).
While it originally had a few businesses, now not even a convenience store can be found here, and there are no schools, no fire station, no library, and no jobs, apart from the local Children’s Aid society that moved into the former Haldimand-Norfolk offices after the region was dissolved in 2000. The nearest school or variety store is in nearby Jarvis, the nearest full-sized grocery store is in Hagersville, the nearest large centre is Simcoe to the west.
At the south end of the small community is the grandly named “Town Centre Boulevard”, now not much more than a driveway. One can imagine the once-grand plans: probably a city built similar to Bramalea, that other “new town” that has since integrated into Toronto – a shopping mall and higher density surrounded by parks and single-family dwellings as some sort of suburban utopia.
An interesting link I found when doing some quick research into Townsend stated that the government created a situation very similar to that of the Pickering airport lands: it expropriated the farms expecting a major new project, and rented them back – causing the original community to decline. Later, the government sold the land back, but not always to the original owners.
One can only imagine what Townsend might have been; Ontario’s only true modern New Town.
In “real life,” five years is not a particularly long time,* but in the online poker universe, it is an eternity. Therefore, to me, at least, it seems odd that a five-year old topic that affected very few people was recently drudged up, but it was, and here we are. Cole “cts687” South recently appeared on the Pokerlife podcast, hosted by Joe “Chicago Joey” Ingram and, among other things (it was a three-hour chat session), he discussed the 2009 incident in which a couple of his poker pro friends won millions from the then-unknown Isildur1 and proceeded to be accused of cheating by many in the poker community.
It was December 8th, 2009 and a shadowy figure known as “Isildur1” had taken the high stakes online cash games by storm, winning and losing six and seven figure sums of money on just about a daily basis. Nosebleed stakes players need to have at least a little bit of a disdain for money, but Isildur1 seemed to treat money like it was totally disposable. And nobody knew who he was.
That day, he had been doing well, seeing his bankroll increase by as much as $2 million. He was still up over a million dollars when Brian Hastings came along for a dance. Less than 3,000 hands later, Hastings had won a mind boggling $4.2 million from Isildur1 (we have since come to know him by his real name, Viktor Blom), leaving online poker’s newest star searching for answers.
Sometime later, Hastings was interviewed by ESPN.com and gave credit for his great night to his friends, saying, “Obviously I’m happy and I’ll take it, but Brian [Townsend] did a ton of work. The three of us discussed a ton of hands and the reports that Brian made, so I’m very thankful to him and to Cole as well.”
That seemed innocent enough, but it turned into a total shit storm, as the three started being accused of sharing hand histories and effectively colluding against Isildur1. Brian Townsend, the one who Hastings thanked for putting together reports on Isildur1, had his “red pro” status on Full Tilt Poker taken away a month. Townsend addressed the issue on his blog, saying that while he did purchase 30,000 hand histories to go along with the 20,000 he already had, he did not share them with his friends. He simply discussed strategy with them. He acknowledged that he should not have bought the hand histories, but adamantly denied doing anything else that was against the rules.
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In the podcast, Ingram asked Cole South to talk about what happened, as his name was mentioned by Hastings in the ESPN interview. He backed up Townsend’s story, saying that all they did was talk poker like any friends would. Townsend did have hand histories, but he did not give them to either South or Hastings; he simply shared any tips he might have. Friends do that sort of thing. To quote:
Stinger [Brian Hastings] gave an interview with ESPN – Gary Wise, I think was the reporter – and said something to the effect, or at least Gary thought, that we merged our hand histories into one database and then used that to come up with some strategy against Isildur, which absolutely did not happen. I’ve got my hand histories, I’ve never sent them to Stinger or Brian Townsend, and I never received any of theirs. Stone cold, zero of that.
What did happen was Brian Townsend bought some hand histories from PTR [PokerTableRatings.com]…he then, just like had some overall tips for playing against Isildur. It was not anything remotely, I hesitate to say “useful”…the guy’s like aggressive in this spot, it was just like talking to your friends about poker. He sent like an e-mail with like three points on like things he would do when he’s playing against Isildur. And I like talk about my opponents’ strategies pretty frequently with people I’m playing. This was extremely tame, nothing I would remotely consider out of line.
What Happened To Brian Townsend
At this point, February 2015, I doubt anybody really cares about this anymore besides maybe Viktor Blom, but South talked about it, so there you have it.
What Happened To Brian Townsend
*Then again, if you think of five years as about six percent of your life, it does seem pretty significant. I’m getting depressed just thinking about it.