In the world of poker, the name Gus Hansen is as well-known as McDonald’s. Or it used to be.
In the late 2000s, he was featured regularly on poker tv shows and played in some of the most prestigious poker tournaments on the circuit, winning quite a few and walking away with million-dollar paydays on a regular basis.
Being a game of tells, of reading another player’s body language as well as remembering what cards they have played, poker is an easy game to play, but a hard one to master. There are so many variables that to win consistently requires a high level of skill, concentration, and sometimes just a little bit of luck.
The Great Dane, as he came to be known, had such an unreadable and unpredictable style of play when he first burst onto the poker scene, that it was impossible to tell if he had the goods when he pushed all in, or if he was trying to pull off one of the insane bluffs that he was becoming renowned for.
His loose style started to pay off handsomely from 2002 when he started a run of winning that saw him capture the Five Diamond World Poker Classic for $556,460, then the L.A. Poker Classic for a further $530,000, followed by the PCA trophy for $445,000. He was, as they say, on fire.
A few years later in 2005 he entered the $400,000 buy-in tournament with some of the world’s top players, took them out, and walked away with a cool $1,000,000. Another million-dollar cheque, $1,714,800, came in 2008 in the WPT Championship.
And even more first-place trophies came his way in the World Series of Poker, an organization that stages some of the most prestigious tournaments in the poker world. In 2010, Hansen entered the WSOPE High Rollers heads-up event and left with another winner’s cheque for $288,409, and his first WSOP bracelet.
Within this period, he captured a further 2 WPT titles, and the big cheques that went with them, as well as cashing in a host of tournaments where he didn’t manage to finish in the top 10, or even in the top 100, yet still walked away regularly with winnings from $40,000 to over $150,000.
Due to his skill, style, and unpredictable play, he had soon amassed winnings of over $11 million and it wasn’t long before he was inaugurated into the World Poker Tour Walk of Fame alongside such players as the truly legendary, Doyle Brunson.
Life was good for the poker player from Copenhagen, Denmark.
Unfortunately, the problem with poker, as with any game that has an element of chance, is that for every upswing, there has to be a downturn. And when that happens the blows can come thick, fast, and very painfully.
For the Great Dane, his Achilles Heel came in the form of online poker.
He was so accustomed to winning in live games, of playing high stakes at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, that he surmised, incorrectly, that he could transition effortlessly into the online arena and continue to play at the nosebleed levels against the best players in the world.
A harsh lesson was about to be learned.
Online poker is a different beast. There are no tells to be read, no staring down an opponent to see if they are bluffing, or if they have the stone-cold nuts. And conversely, he couldn’t project an image that would rattle their play. In other words, all the advantages he had from playing live games were gone, accounting for nothing in the virtual poker world.
He was at a disadvantage and there were weeks when Gus Hansen lost $600,000, months when he lost less, years when he lost millions.
But he had no intention of giving up, no intention of backing down.
So, he chased those losses as most gamblers do, clawing back occasionally, his confidence given a boost. But more often than not he would fall deeper into the hole, a hole that just kept getting deeper, and with losses that just kept getting bigger.
In the space of a few years, Gus Hansen’s bankroll was running on empty, all his years of winning world-class tournaments and amassing a wealth undreamed of by other poker players simple gone, depleted, drained away one digital chip at a time by online players who were on another level.
In total, breathtakingly, his losses were slightly over $20 million.
From his introduction to poker at the Ocean View Card Room while he was an exchange student at UC Santa Cruz in California, Gus Hansen managed to climb the often-slippery slope to reach the pinnacle of success in the poker world. He became an instantly recognizable figure around the world, and an exciting player to watch.
The amount of money he lost online amounted to a colossal sum, the second-highest in online poker history, in fact, yet who’s to say that one day he won’t be back playing at the super nose bleed levels with the best players in the world.
He may be down $20 million, he maybe had to return to accounting to earn a living, but it may be premature to count Gus Hansen out of the game just yet. After all, they don’t call him the Great Dane for nothing.