Gus Hansen: Climbing Out of the High-Stakes Dungeon

Gus Hansen’s situation can be loosely compared to that of a couple of players from the 1994 major league baseball strike, which ended the season prematurely in early August.

During that summer, Matt Williams of the San Francisco Giants had a chance to break Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61 home runs. Williams had hit 43 home runs when the strike forced the cancellation of the remaining 47 games of the regular season. Ken Griffey Jr., who also was on pace to approach the record, ended the season with one fewer home run than Williams, and was quoted as saying that they chose a poor season to have a good year. And Hansen picked the wrong time to put up his best-ever online results.

However, Hansen is a stubborn guy, and just like baseball, online poker will make a comeback. After falling about $10 million into the red from playing on the Internet this past fall, Hansen began having doubts about his ability to beat the virtual competition. But the career games player remained resilient, even when it seemed like the nosebleed-stakes regulars were swarming around his tables. His efforts have paid off, as he is sitting on $4 million in profits from online poker in 2011.

Those results are likely to hold, not only because the 37-year-old Danish poker pro has retooled his game, but because the unfortunate developments of April 15 in the United States have thus far asphyxiated the nosebleed-stakes scene. Hansen, who is a Full Tilt Poker pro living overseas in Monaco, had no comment on the legal issue. Even though American high-stakes players have been absent from the tables on Full Tilt Poker, Hansen has still been online, logging nosebleed-stakes action against European foes.

Despite putting in the majority of his hours online in the recent past, Hansen is one of the most accomplished live players ever. With three World Poker Tour wins, a World Series of Poker Europe bracelet, and numerous other titles, Hansen has amassed $7.7 million in career tournament earnings. He is also a regular participant in the largest live cash games in the world, and once held the record for the largest pot won in televised cash-game history.

Card Player talked to Hansen about his massive upswing in online games, as well as his game-playing life, less than 12 hours before “Black Friday” [April 15] in the poker world.

A Lifer in the Competitive Gaming World

Despite taking tennis and soccer very seriously in his youth, Hansen said that he was never talented enough to become a professional athlete, and if it wasn’t for a random coincidence, he wouldn’t have been a professional games player, either.

Hansen always had a love for competition, whether it was a contest that relied on mostly physical or mostly mental abilities, and he found a real skill in moving pieces around a backgammon board. He soon discovered tournament play, and it wasn’t long before an 18-year-old Hansen found himself on his way to the 1993 World Championship of Backgammon in Monaco. At that point, what started out as just fun was now a way for Hansen to compete against the best in the world — something he never would have been able to do in sports.

Drifting into professional gaming wasn’t what his parents had envisioned for him, but they soon realized that their Gustav had found something in which his talent could be actualized. It became obvious to Hansen’s family that some of the raw ability that he was lacking on the tennis court and the soccer field was present at the backgammon table.

“When I made the decision to be a professional games player, the questions were: What are you getting yourself into? Shouldn’t you get an education? However, I was raised in a very open-minded way, in the sense that my parents were open to the fact that I had found a different path. At first, it seemed to them to be a very strange path, but they quickly realized that I was happy with what I was doing, and it was going all right. Initially, they were surprised, and for lack of a better word, disappointed, but that quickly washed away.”

Hansen isn’t completely sure when he branched off into poker, but he estimates that it was around the same year that he made his first trip to Monaco. Sounding like a true gambler, Hansen calls his discovery of poker a random event, as he doesn’t think his move to the game was a conscious decision. He said that it was more of a natural progression for a young kid who just loved to play games, as well as basic common sense to have more than one discipline in his repertoire.

Despite losing constantly during the acclimation period, poker soon became Hansen’s obsession. “The green felt as a battlefield is always interesting to me,” said Hansen, who began making frequent trips to the United States in the mid-1990s for competitive poker. “The mind games you can play against your opponent are always a lot of fun.” After practice and hours spent at the table studying opponents and learning the basic strategy of poker, the gaming polymath began a suitcase lifestyle that he would maintain until this day.

Moneymaker Who? The Gus Hansen Effect

Long before Hansen was consumed by the nosebleed-stakes online cash games, he was arguably the face of the WPT. His first major-tournament cash was a win in the inaugural WPT Five-Diamond World Poker Classic in 2002, for a massive $556,460 first-place prize. Hansen’s aggressive style of play sent Freddy Deeb to the rail in third place when Deeb’s A-K was outflopped by Hansen’s Q-10, after all of the money went into the middle preflop. In an interview after his elimination, Deeb called Hansen’s play at the final table “very bad,” and said, “I would like to play this game with him every day for the rest of my life.”

Hansen’s game was misunderstood by not only most people watching televised poker for the first time, but by some of the experienced pros in the poker world. “My style of play in 2002 and 2003 was a little bit of an eye-opener for a lot of people,” said Hansen, who was chosen as one of People magazine’s “50 Sexiest Men Alive” in 2004. “When people saw it back then, and realized it wasn’t the recommended style, they would attribute it to me being crazy and from Europe. However, when the lunatic did very well in the tournament, people started to think that maybe my play wasn’t completely insane, and had some merits.”

After captivating poker minds across the country, Hansen made aggressiveness a popular style, which seemed to resonate through the poker boom and beyond. “In 2011, aggressive poker is accepted as the right way of playing,” Hansen said. “In 2003, it was more about people waiting around and trying to trap people. It is very hard to trap people if you don’t have an aggressive approach and image beforehand. Right now, the question is how aggressive you should be, and nobody really has the answer. My style back then indicated to other players that there were different ways to play other than waiting around.”

Despite getting vast amounts of attention as one of the more alluring poker characters to watch on TV in the early 2000s, Hansen remains one of the more humble players in the game today. He admits that his star persona helped increase poker’s popularity, but he refuses to try to gauge how much of it can be traced back to his rush of success in the WPT’s infancy.

The Best Online Upswing of His Career

Hansen’s online-poker career has been marred by hot starts to begin a calendar year, followed by the extermination of those winnings to finish the year in a massive hole. That vicious trend has made Hansen one of the biggest losers in the history of Internet poker. However, since winning his first World Series of Poker bracelet, in London last September, Hansen has been on a tear, erasing about $6 million of his career losses on the virtual felt.

“I’ve made some corrections to mistakes that I’ve been making in the past,” Hansen said. “My focus is a little better, and I stopped playing too loose in some situations. I’ve adjusted to different opponents, and basically have been running a lot better. If we go a year back in time, I wasn’t running too well, and was making bad decisions, which led to the downfall. Fixing the poor decision-making and getting the best of the cards is a recipe for winning on the Internet.”

Even though Hansen has friendships with some of the best cash-game players in the world, he has accomplished the miraculous turnaround largely on his own. His analytical approach has evolved into a self-reflective philosophy, one that has enabled him to take an honest look at what was making him lose session after session for months at a time. “Most of the work has been my own stubbornness in keeping at it, even though my results were excruciatingly poor,” Hansen said. “I stayed with it, trying to understand why I was losing to specific people.”

While focusing on taming his aggressiveness, Hansen also tries to keep variance at a minimum these days, frequently leaving tables when he becomes too deep-stacked.

“I don’t mind playing a big pot, but all within reason,” said Hansen, who has played primarily capped pot-limit Omaha over the past eight months. “I don’t have $200 million to play coin flips for a million at a time, and neither does anyone else — but they seem to think that is the right way to go. I shy away from the insane deep-stack games. I did have one session recently against [Scott] ‘URnotINdanger2’ [Palmer], in which we played deep, but once we got up to $200,000 each, I sat out and opened a new table with more reasonably sized stacks.”

A lot of professional poker players want to play $200-$400 pot-limit Omaha with $500,000 stack sizes, according to Hansen. “Who do they think they are? John Wayne? I know that [Ilari] ‘Ziigmund’ [Sahamies] thinks he can deep-stack outplay anyone in the world, but looking at his results, he obviously can’t. Why do you want to put up $500,000 in a $200-$400 game just to get it all in when you have top set against flush and straight draws? Why do you want to flip a coin for that amount? It seems like players today think, the bigger, the better, because they think they are the greatest of all time.”

His conservative style of play has worked out well in marathon sessions against Palmer and against another of online poker’s biggest winners — Dan “jungleman12” Cates. Hansen attributes his success against the pair of Maryland natives to patience. “Whenever I hit a good flop and they hit a poor flop, they throw in a bluff, and it seems like I’m taking all of their money,” Hansen said.

Although people tend to become more conservative as they age, Hansen said that none of his change in style is a result of nearing 40. “I was just sick of losing on the Internet,” Hansen said. “Oftentimes, you have to blame yourself for losing. Changing a losing game seemed like a good strategy. I was looking for a prettier outcome, and that obviously meant correcting some of the flaws and changing gears more often within a session.”

In the midst of what seemed like a perpetual career downswing, Hansen took breaks to clear his head. He said that it’s generally a good idea to step away from poker if things are going the wrong way. “If you are in a brain freeze, it’s a good idea to go for a run, take a break for a week or two, or whatever amount of time is needed to recoup and get your head back on track. I have never felt like I needed six months off, or something like that. I don’t think that’s the right approach, but it’s definitely good to clear your thoughts and spend time doing something else that you enjoy, whether it’s sports, lying on the beach, vacationing, sex, drugs, or rock ’n’ roll — whatever floats your boat.”

Not a Danish Nostradamus

About a year ago, it seemed inevitable that Hansen would become the most unsuccessful online player in history. Poker, perhaps more so than most things in life, is incredibly unpredictable. A losing session can quickly become a player’s best ever, a career year can erode into devastation with a single day of poor bankroll management, one day a robust high-stakes scene can evaporate, and an 18-year-old kid from Denmark, who didn’t know that a flush beat a straight, can eventually become one of the most recognizable faces of no-limit hold’em.

“When I was 18 and just out of high school, I never imagined myself sitting at a green table playing cards on TV with many people watching,” Hansen said. “The fact that it has taken that turn is obviously positive, not because I need to be on TV, but because the game that I play has become more popular, and more possibilities have come along. In the late 1990s, you would have had to have been Nostradamus to predict the poker boom.”

While the poker community is rallying around a goal of creating a sustainable online-poker system in the future that is good for the game as well as its players, no one is able to predict what exactly will happen in the upcoming months. Poker is a game of swings, and as Hansen put it, you would have to be Nostradamus to see the future.
Despite the volatility of poker, it seems a certainty that fans of the game will be able to watch the tumultuous sessions of Hansen for many more years to come. The “Great Dane” isn’t going anywhere. “I rarely plan too far ahead,” Hansen admitted, “but it’s hard to imagine that I will completely leave the gambling world to do something else.” ♠