Gus Hansen Eyes Pivotal Role In Post-Black Friday Healing Process

There are not many players associated with the old version of Full Tilt Poker who managed to come out unscathed by the drama and scandal. Danish pro Gus Hansen, however, is one.

American victims have still yet to be compensated from the Justice Department for Full Tilt Poker’s insolvency. However, players from other countries have already started to move on, some of whom are playing once again on the poker site after reuniting with their account balances.

PokerStars acquired the defunct business this summer as part of its own settlement with the U.S. government and restarted the games there on Nov. 6.

Leading the way in the rebirth of the disgraced company is Hansen. He was the first to join the new Full Tilt Poker as a sponsored player.

Despite being a member of “Team Full Tilt” while the site was allegedly looting player accounts, Hansen was never implicated in any of the company’s wrongdoing. Even some of those who have never been accused of a crime had their images damaged when reports surfaced of unpaid debts.

The 38-year-old Hansen has been a high-volume grinder for years, playing for some of the priciest stakes the poker world has ever known. When Full Tilt Poker went down in summer 2011, he had millions locked up on there. Hansen, living overseas in Monaco, was able to continue to play even after the Americans left the tables on Black Friday.

“I tried to think of the shutdown as a very poor hand of poker,” Hansen said. “It is publicly known that [Dan] Jungleman [Cates] had a lot of money on there. Even though I didn’t have the same amount, I was the second largest balance on Full Tilt Poker when it shut down. I survived. It wasn’t the end of the world. I tried not to lose too much sleep over it. I was hoping everyone would pull together and a solution would be reached, which fortunately it was at the end.”

Clean record before and after the scandal

Hansen joined the Full Tilt Poker business in 2006, two years after it was founded.
He has not been accused of receiving any money related to the fraudulent activity as an employee of the site, and he was not accused of having any outstanding debt in the matter.

Numerous poker pros owed millions collectively to the firm — a predicament which caused some issues in acquisition talks with at least one other potential investor before PokerStars stepped in to save the day and itself from the feds.

In some ways it is remarkable that anyone associated with the company still has marketability, relevance or credibility in the poker community. However, Hansen managed to defy common logic and beat the odds.

He is all about moving forward, however, and he doesn’t really want to talk about the past.

Hansen did not want to “go into the names [of past Full Tilt members], whether in the positive or negative direction.”

“I’ve kind of been lying low,” Hansen said. “I think I have acted in a respectable manner toward everything that has happened pre-and-post Black Friday. In that sense, I think [signing with new Full Tilt Poker] was a really good matchup. When I was contacted by the new Full Tilt under the new management I was excited to get back in action.”

‘Not going to name myself captain of the football team’

Hansen was the first to join the new Full Tilt Poker as a sponsored player, but he was not the last.

Less than two weeks after Hansen came on board the company announced that former site pro Tom “durrrr” Dwan and former PokerStars pro Viktor “Isildur1” Blom would be back. Despite playing for PokerStars for awhile, Blom is still best known from his days on Full Tilt Poker.

With the trio of high-stakes cash game players representing the site, Full Tilt Poker has seemingly made a commitment in trying to bring back some of the nosebleed magic that once made the site famous. No other online poker site in history ever had quite the action it had pre-Black Friday.

Even though he is the elder of the small group, Hansen is not assuming any authority or control over his two colleagues.

“I am not going to name myself captain of the football team or anything,” he said.

The Gus Hansen Effect

Long before Hansen was consumed by the nosebleed online cash games, he was arguably the face of the World Poker Tour. He is one of the most accomplished live players of all-time.

With three World Poker Tour wins, his first World Series of Poker bracelet in September 2010, a $1 million cash at this summer’s WSOP and numerous other titles and huge scores, Hansen has amassed nearly $10 million in career tournament earnings.

His first major tournament cash was a win in the inaugural WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic in 2002. It was for a $556,460 first-place prize. Hansen’s aggressive style of play led him to send fellow poker pro Freddy Deeb to the rail in third place. Deeb’s A-K lost to Hansen’s Q-10 after all the money went into the middle preflop.

In an interview after his elimination, Deeb blasted Hansen’s play at the final table, calling it “very bad.” Deeb added: “I would like to play this game with him every day for the rest of my life.”

Hansen’s game was not only misunderstood by most watching televised poker for the first time, but also 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 has also garnished attention off the felt by being named as one of People Magazine’s 50 Sexiest Men Alive in 2004. “When people saw it back then and realized it was not 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 was not completely insane, and it had some merits.”

Hansen made aggressiveness a popular style, one that seemed to resonate through the poker boom and beyond. He admits that he helped increase poker’s popularity.

When he was not on the computer or playing live tournaments, Hansen was also a regular in the largest live cash games in the world, once holding the record for the largest pot ever won on TV.

The Game Show Network’s High Stakes Poker, which showcased Hansen’s cash game prowess, was another casualty of Black Friday.

Background to Weather Swings

Since Hansen’s poker breakthrough, he has often found himself involved on the business end of the game. A site he helped launch in the online poker boom years, Pokerchamp.com, was eventually sold to Betfair. His 2008 book, Every Hand Revealed , which detailed each hand played in a $1.2 million victory at the Aussie Millions main event, was immediately recognized as one of poker’s best strategy books. He also built a now defunct poker strategy website, ThePlayr, and an online poker channel, GusHansenTV.

Perhaps due to the fact that he was successful in off-the-felt business ventures, Hansen was never likely to leave the game, even when he was in the midst of historic downswings that would cause almost any other poker player to have a mental breakdown.
He has always been diversified. Having millions stuck on Full Tilt during the period when the chains were covering its doors never stopped him from continuing to playing the high stakes around the world. His bets, although sometimes insanely aggressive, were always hedged.

After falling more than $9 million into the red from Internet cards in fall 2010, Hansen did start to have doubts over his ability to beat the competition. The career games player remained resilient even when it seemed like nosebleed regulars would swarm around his tables.

The stubbornness paid off.

Career upswing cut short

Hansen’s online poker career had been marred by hot starts to begin a calendar year, only to have the winnings evaporate.

The vicious trend made Hansen one of the biggest losers in the history of web poker. However, around the time he won his first World Series of Poker bracelet in September 2010, Hansen went on a tear, erasing about $6 million of his career losses on the virtual felt.

“I made some corrections to mistakes I’d been making,” Hansen said at the time. “My focus is a little better, and I stopped playing too loose in some situations. I’ve adjusted to my different opponents and basically have been running a lot better. If we go a year back in time, I was not running too well, and I was making bad decisions, which lead to the downfall.”

His analytical approach evolved into self-reflection, something which allowed 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.”

After focusing on taming his aggressiveness, Hansen tries to keep the variance to a minimum these days. He likes to leave tables when he becomes too deep stacked.

“I don’t mind playing a big pot, but all within reason,” he said. “I do not have $200 million to play coinflips for a million at a time and neither does anyone else. I shy away from the insane deep-stack games.”

Hansen plans on maintaining this philosophy while playing on the new Full Tilt.

Although people tend to become more conservative as they age, Hansen said that none of his change in style is a result getting old by poker standards.

“I was just sick of losing on the Internet,” Hansen said. “Often 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.”

In the midst of what seemed like a perpetual downswing, Hansen took breaks to clear his head. He said it is generally a good idea to step away from poker if things are going the wrong way.

“I have never felt like I needed six months off or something like that,” said Hansen, although he admitted that Full Tilt’s shutdown did provide an unexpectedly pleasant breather. “That is not the right approach. However, clear your thoughts and spend time doing something else you enjoy.”

Hansen said he plans on continuing his uptick right where he left off.

Rebuilding the game

In a sense, Hansen doesn’t just represent the new Full Tilt Poker. He is at the forefront trying to restore online poker’s image. It is something he feels proud to be able to do.

Hansen said that at a young age he could never have imagined where the game would take him. He has never needed the attention of TV, he maintains, but he enjoys the spotlight because it usually means the game itself is doing well.

That is what it is like this time around.

“Poker has taken a hit,” Hansen said of Black Friday — and perhaps it has deserved it. However, Hansen does not want to let the misconduct of some tarnish his beloved pastime.

Hansen thinks the PokerStars takeover helped poker “regain some momentum.”

Part of his plan is to give some of those playing lower stakes a chance to take some of his money. Hansen will be dropping down a bit to play with some of his fans.

“I haven’t played a lot of low-stakes poker in many years,” Hansen said.

Through his personality on and off the felt, as well as his wild sessions, the poker pro thinks he can push the bad moments of recent memory a little bit closer to the muck.

“Unfortunately I am not in a position to put any pressure of any kind on the Department of Justice,” Hansen said of the continued agony of American players. “I don’t have any superhero powers. I wish I did, but I do not have any say. I really hope that with the settlement Americans are paid back. Hopefully [the government] will fulfill its obligation.”♠