Also known as the “Great Dane,” Gus Hansen is famous for his enormous swings at Full Tilt Poker’s nosebleed tables. Nowhere is this fact more evident than by looking at his HighStakesDB graph, where he was initially very unsuccessful from the beginning of 2007 to the summer of 2008 (-$2.46 million). Fortunately for Hansen, there was light at the end of the tunnel when he went on a big run over the next few months to book $2 million in winnings by November, 2008. However, he suffered through one of the worst runs in poker history as he lost over $11 million in less than two years. Since then, Hansen has risen from the ashes to earn over $5.5 million during the end of 2010/first half of 2011, and now sits at -$3.53 million in career online winnings.
Born in 1974, in Copenhagen, Denmark, Gus Hansen displayed a competitive streak early on. He played tennis as a child, but backgammon was his real career choice. He moved to New York where the backgammon scene was supposed to be hotter than in Europe, but eventually got hooked on poker. He had actually played poker before, back in 1993 when he was an exchange student in Santa Cruz, California. Nowadays he resides in Monaco, like so many of the other high stakes pros.
Hansen considers himself a gambler, and he’s been known to post huge sums on various prop bets. When it came to poker, he proved to be successful away from the table too. In 2003, he launched an online poker site (pokerchamps.com) together with partners Tony G and Erik "Erik123" Sagström, which they later sold to Betfair for $15 million.
Gus Hansen has 7 money finishes in various WSOP events, which includes a bracelet in the 2010 WSOPE £10,000 NLHE High Roller Heads-Up event. In addition to the WSOP success, he also has a record-three WPT titles, a 2007 Aussie Millions win, a Full Tilt Poker Million IX title, and over $9.1 million in live tournament winnings.
Hansen is a bona fide TV poker star having appeared on numerous shows such as High States Poker, Professional Poker Tour and Poker After Dark. He’s known for his looser-than-loose and super-aggressive style, which of course makes for excellent TV, so no wonder why he’s appeared in more televised events than your average multi-millionaire poker professional. In addition to the television appearances, Hansen also wrote a popular book called Every Hand Revealed, in which he discussed various hands from his Aussie Millions Main Event victory.