Five reasons to keep faith with Gus Hansen

Losing 16 million online doesn’t make you a losing player. Five reasons to keep faith with Gus Hansen.

Highstakesdb graph: we still believe in Gus

Mainstream poker media has been reporting on a weekly basis Gus Hansen’s disaster on the Highest Stakes of Full Tilt Poker.  16m lost in less than 5 years is a lot but Somuchpoker still believes in Gus Hansen. These are our reasons to keep faith with him :

1:  His Backgammon skills

Before playing poker Gus made a living playing backgammon, and is still considered one of the best players in the world. Backgammon has an internal voting system where all the top players have a say in who they think should be on top of the list. So every other year a new list comes out with the current top 32 Backgammon Giants. Gus Hansen is usually prowling around at nr 23-28.

In Backgammon like in poker you can play for big money. French Backgammon and poker player Jean-Philippe Rohr reported to Pokerlistings about an interesting story involving Hansen’s Backgammon skills. Rohr said, “But when you consider that last year in Monaco, Gus Hansen was the High Roller chip leader after Day 1 and did not even come on Day 2 because he plays backgammon in his room, and he earns 2 million and a half dollars in a weekend.”

2: Macau  

Winning more than you should when you are playing the biggest live cash game ever organized is a good way to save money for the rainy days.

Gus Hansen started to play the Big Game in Macau a few years ago with Tom Dwan, Andrew Robl, Phil Ivey,  and John Juanda. Various sources seem to prove that he did very well in this Highstakes Game.  In early 2012, Pokerportal reported that Gus Hansen was on a giant heater and won an astronomical HKD $30 million (USD $3.86 million) during a single marathon session.

He confirmed himself later that his multiple stays in Macau have been profitable for him during an interview with Pokerlistings: “Right now the games in Macau have been good to me so I’m going to pursue the Macau games. I’ve been running good”

3: Teaching Chinese poker

Gus Hansen is famous  for being an all-around player willing to give action in any game format. If this habit cost him a lot of money online, it is not always the case when he plays live games.

During the last Main Event of the World Series of Poker, both Gus Hansen and Tom Dwan didn’t play a single hand during the first day of the tournament. They were more interested in a huge $3000 per point game Open Face Chinese poker game happening at the Aria Casino. Players involved in this game were Jason Mercier, Richard Yong and his relatives. It’s rumored that Hansen did extremely well from it and succeeded in building a stack of over $1.5 million.

Another episode involving Gus Hansen and Chinese poker has been reported by Viktor Blom on twitter

It’s not clear how much Viktor Blom paid for his Chinese poker “education” but it’s sure that Gus Hansen and Tom Dwan are not the cheapest coaches on the market.

4: Poker is his business

In 2003, Gus Hansen together with some partners founded the online poker site pokerchamps.com.  Two years later, the company was sold to the Betfair for over $15 million. In 2007, Hansen launched a poker forum and strategy website, named ThePlayr.com. In April 08 the site was the biggest poker news site and second largest poker community site in Denmark. He sold ThePlayr.com in 2008.

Gus Hansen also played an important role in the Full Tilt Story. He is not one of the ten original co-founders of the site but he very quickly joined the Full Tilt team with Mike Matusow. The financial conditions of his participation are unknown but It has been speculated that Hansen was co-owner of the site. In 2012, Hansen was re-signed as brand ambassador under the new management team of Full Tilt Poker.

Other activities of Gus Hansen in the poker industry include his book (Every Hand Revealed, a hand-by-hand breakdown of his win of the Aussie Millions World Poker Tour tournament), his involvement as commentator for the Backgammon World Series and one attempt to launch his own TV Channel (Gus Hansen TV)…

5: He may still know how to play tournaments

If you recently read about Gus Hansen, it is very likely that you would have seen his name associated with the following expressions: “Fish, biggest loser in poker history, Whale, Degenerate gambler”. People seem to forget Gus Hansen accomplishments in Live tournaments. He is currently ranked 15^th on the All Time Money list with more than $11M of cumulated live tournament earnings. After one of the most unique winning streak’s in the Word Poker Tour history, he was one of the first three players inducted into the WPT Walk of Fame with Doyle Brunson and James Garner.  His “rush” started with a first place at the WPT Five Diamond Classic for $555,465, continued with a second win a few month’s later at the L.A Poker Classic for an extra $532,490 and finished less than a year later with a 3^rd place at the following edition of the Five Diamond Classic for $ 276,000. He also won as a “Bonus” during the same period the WPT Bad Boys of Poker Invitational event against 6 other legends of the WPT Circuit. He confirmed his love for this circuit with his best Live tournament cash in April 2008 when he finished runner up of the Sixth Annual Five Star WPT Classic for more than $1,7m.

Gus Hansen’s tournament performances are not limited to the WPT Circuit. He also holds one Word Series of Poker Europe bracelet (£10,000 No Limit Heads-Up High Roller Event), won from a satellite a seat for the 2012 One Drop event worth $1m and won the 2004 PokerStars.com Caribbean Adventure which paid out nearly $500,000.