Sunday
January 03, 2010
As I am writing this, I am sitting in Denmark after a nice Christmas and new year’s celebration. So who better to take on in our 2009 summaries than Gus Hansen. Hansen is a player that seems to stir something special among the people who are following the online high stakes games on a regular basis. Some have the opinion that he is an automatic donator in these games, while other says that he just plays with a style that invokes a huge variance in his results.
It is very difficult for me to say what the correct judgments is, but the fact is that Hansen himself has stated in interviews that he has been playing really bad in 2009. However, there is a big difference between playing bad and being a bad player, and I am pretty sure that he is not the latter. In fact, he started out 2009 like a house on fire, and by the end of March he had amassed winnings in excess of $4.8M. I haven’t looked back in the forums, but I doubt very much that he was called a fish by many people back then.
Fast forward eight months, and you have a player who ends the year down $5.5M. So what is it that could cause such a massive reversal of fortunes? After all, you probably don’t go from winning $4.8M in 82 000 hands, to losing $10.3M over the next 200 000 hands without a reason. In many ways, your guess would be as good as mine. Plowing through the hands to try to come up with a good answer is probably a good thing to do for someone preparing for a dissertation on high stakes poker. My best guess is that he started running bad for an extended period, and that this in turn made him play below his usual standard. It is a phenomenon that is well documented among poker players, and is something we are seeing time and again. Hansen has eluded to this in some of the interviews that I have read, and he even took a break recently to get a new perspective on poker.
We have seen him make a return to the tables in the last few weeks, mostly at lower stakes than we are used to seeing him at. Hopefully, for him, it is a sign that he is working through the problems and that we will see him from a different side than we have done over the last eight months.
Going through his splits, it is easy to see that he basically lost money at whichever game he has tried his hand at in 2009. I was a bit surprised, though, to see that it was the mixed games that cost him the most money. Without studying the numbers, I would have guessed that Hansen took the heaviest hits in PLO, but it turns out that more than half his result in 2009 can be attributed to 29K hands of $500/$1000 Pot Limit Hold’em. Having said that, he didn’t have a very good run the times he tried playing PLO $200/$400 with a $70 ante either. Here, he lost a massive $3.1M over 26K, which means that all of Hansen’s losses can be found in these two games.
Gus Hansen rivers a flush to win a $460K pot.
Well, Hansen was certainly not running bad on this hand. He flopped the nut flush draw, but he was a distant third in the hand with Juanda having flopped top set and durrrr top two pairs and a gut shot straight draw. The only good news for Hansen here is that durrrr is covering some of Juanda’s re-draws, but there are also three dead diamonds in the opponents hands.
When the club came on the turn giving Hansen a second flush draw, the temptation to go all the way with his hand is too much for Him to pass up. He probably should have given the decision some more thought, though. Juanda has made big bets on both the flop and thje turn, and durrrr makes a strong move on the turn as well. All of this should tell Hansen that he has far fewer winners than you might think at first glance. As it was, Hansen was almost a 6-1 underdog after the turn, and he didn’t even get 2-1 pot odds on his call. This time around, however, the card gods decided to smile to him, and rewarded his play with a monster pot.
Hansen and his Aces gets out-flopped by Cole South. $447K pot.
This was not the largest PLO hand that Hansen lost in 2009, but since we already reported on that one, I give you another hand to look at. Hansen got really unlucky here as Cole South made an ill advised 5 bet out of position and was forced to put in a lot more money before the flop than he should have done.
Before the flop, Hansen was a 3-1 favorite, but when the flop came, the tables had turned completely. Top two pairs and the nut flush draw is pretty much as good as Cole could dear to hope for. Hansen, on the other hand, had little choice but to move in on the flop. The pot is too big for any other action to be considered. This is the kind of pot where an EV graph is meaningless. It would show that Hansen got his money in when he was way behind even if he in essence was pot committed by the pre-flop action.
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