Gus Hansen
The Great Dane of poker, Gus Hansen is a serious force to be reckoned with on the felt. A Denmark native residing in Monaco, Gus Hansen has a fierce reputation throughout the Texas Hold’Em scene as a loose and aggressive poker player who will play almost any two hole cards, and bluffs and raises with carefree (or is it careless?) abandon.
Before professional poker was his game, Gus Hansen got his competitive start playing backgammon and tennis, both with the same level of excellence and world class status that he eventually became known for in the world of poker. He first learned poker in 1993 while attending University of California-Santa Cruz as a foreign exchange student.
He moved to New York City in 2000 with the intention of playing backgammon professionally but found the field too small to build a lifetime vocation around. So this self-named Professional Gambler moved on to other sports, like poker. To this day, he still places bets on various professional sports and takes personal bets on numerous challenges to his various athletic and otherwise competitive abilities.
While Gus Hansen’s brazen poker strategy may too harrowing for most players to emulate, it has done him enormously well over the years. As for the major televised tournaments, his best performance has consistently been at World Poker Tour events. He’s the only player to ever have won 3 World Poker Tour open tournaments, and he was the winner of the inaugural WPT Bad Boys of Poker tournament.
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Interestingly enough, however, Gus Hansen has not fared at all well at the World Series of Poker, what many consider the defining event in a poker player’s status. The best he’s done so far in the annual tournament is placing 150th in 2004.
He made it to the final table of the 2006 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions but was knocked out on the very first hand, his AK hole cards getting beat by a couple of 9’s.
In February of 2004, Gus Hansen was among the first - along with Doyle Brunson and James Garner - to be inducted into the new World Poker Tour Walk of Fame at the Commerce Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada (the largest casino for card players in the world, with over 240 card tables). To date, there have been no new inductees.
Gus Hansen won the $100,000+ grand prize at the first ever European Poker Masters event, the London All-Star Challenge, in September of 2006 (runner-up: Marc Goodwin). And he won the $1 million grand prize in the first ever Fox Sports Net’s Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament (runner-up: Johnny Chan).
The team that won the Party Poker Football and Poker Legends Cup counted Gus Hansen among its number (the others being fellow-Danes Kim Christofte and Theo Jorgensen. When Poker After Dark first aired on NBC, Gus Hansen was the big winner. And in January of 2007, he beat out nearly 750 other players to cash in the $1.5 million grand prize at the Melbourne, Australia Aussie Millions.
These days, he can be seen on TV regularly competing in the Professional Poker Tour and High Stakes Poker Season 2. So far, he is the top-winner in High Stakes Poker history, winning $575,700 after a final hand against fellow poker star Daniel Negreanu, the former’s pair of 5’s faring better than the latter’s pair of 6’s.
After co founding and then eventually selling PokerChamps.com (to BetFair), the consummate gambler Gus Hansen is now an official spokesplayer for FullTilt.net.
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