blonde poker forum

Barry Carter did a piece on PokerStrategy.com in which he mentioned that Gus Hansen & Viktor Blom have both left Full Tilt.

In it, it states......


Gus Hansen has lost $17 million since the site relaunched in 2012


Really?

Is that true?

His own money, or was he staked, & if he was staked, what % was his own?

SEVENTEEN MILLION? Are you serious?

Where would that sort of money come from? Surely he is not good for sums of that magnitude?

What are the cliffs behind all this? 17 milly? Jeez!


 http://www.pokerstrategy.com/news/world-of-poker/Gus-Hansen-and-Viktor-Blom-leave-Full-Tilt_87716/


(https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTmzoVxfYY0djUXcmi75yS5GQE2rBjF5fxFkacjHlIfmwisbfYpMw)

About time imo. Maybe now they don't have a free loader on their books, they can look at making their mtt structure bigger and better to bring more traffic onto the site.

I'd heard he'd been a losing player for a long time, but didn't realise it was as big as $17m

My gut reaction is to doubt it is that much, but I'm probably wrong & I'm sure it can be verified on one of those ranking site things.

Some ad for Full Tilt, & "Responsible Gaming", if he lost anything like that.

Maybe those Amaya people are tidying up a few things.

He'd be a "hero" to many.

Good grief. 

It makes you wonder how many big names in poker are actually not winners of the game

I just read on EGR that Full Tilt are "repositioning" their brand to appeal more to casual & recreational players, so that may partly explain some of the Hansen thing.

"Come play on Tilt, where Gus lost $17 milly" is probably not optimum Message.
 

I'd be tilted to lose $17, never mind having six 0's behind that number

Didn't he make a boatload when he sold his own site (was it to betfair?), before joining Full Tilt.

A Scandinavian friend of mine, who used to play high stakes on Ladbrokes, said that a mutual friend had told him that Gus was getting ~€300k per month from FTP, and this is going back a while now.

I guess that kept things ticking over, for a while, and he is pretty nifty at Backgammon, I think.

All conjecture, but I'm sure I read somewhere that Richard Yong (sp) is/was backing him.

If he is backed now, I guess his backer is holding out for a onedrop victory, so he can drop him :D

Pretty sure Galfond once did a piece saying that Hansen is the reason the nosebleed cash games still exist.

On a side note, the thread title reminded me of this,

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6hqRxRRSZs

Norm Duke, one of the greatest tenpin bowlers ever (the best in my opinion), ripping it up with a cool bit of gamesmanship in the final of a big tournament. Relevant bit is four minutes in.

Welcome to 2010 :)

Amazing how long he's been losing for, and how much he's lost, without at any point stopping or even slowing down

This is from an interview in early 2011

I’m met with a typically cryptic answer about the size of his bankroll. ‘Since I’m still around and I still play fairly high stakes on the internet and I’m not staked by anyone, it probably means I’m doing okay. The good thing about losing that kind of money is that you must have had it from somewhere.’ I tentatively approach the subject of the $8m+ in losses by framing myself as a lowly messenger. There’s a pause as Hansen lets the information filter through. I gaze down waiting for the reproach. ‘Uh, that sounds about right,’ he says. ‘I think it is probably slightly on the high side but it’s not way off. Obviously it’s not plus.’ I casually drop in, ‘That’s quite a big figure,’ to which he grins and scratches his chin. ‘It’s a very big figure.’


http://www.pokerplayer365.com/poker-players/who-is-gus-hansen-we-asked-the-questions-and-these-are-the-explosive-results-if-you-dont-take-that-fing-camera-out-of-my-face-im-going-to-knock-you-out/

Haha, good stuff!

I used to love bowling, and used to play 3/4 afternoons a week when I was based at HMS Nelson.

They had a bowling alley around the corner, and it was a 50p a game or something, if you showed your RN ID.

Got up around the 250s a few times, but never managed the holy grail :(

I don't know if he has ever crushed these nose bleed staked games but it's very hard to admit games that you used to be able to beat you can't any more and to stop playing them.  Your ego doesn't let you.  You think it's just a short term downswing etc etc.  This happened to me in 2011/2 when i went a year breaking even after rakeback playing the mid/high stakes stts i used to beat on betfair.  Looking back i knew i didn't really have an edge in the games the same 5 regs were playing them all every hour of every day but kept playing them for a year longer than i should have really making nothing.  As a professional gambler/poker player you have to understand that you haven't suddenly become shit at poker but that there is no edge in the game and as it's your income you have to walk away asap to avoid what's happening to Hansen.  The flip side is you can invest shit loads of time in training/developing if you feel the investment of time/money will provide suitable returns.  I made the decision that online stts were getting close to being played perfectly at any decent level and even if i played them 100% perfectly from training etc there still wouldn't be much of a return in them long term moving forward so i decided to move on.  I have gone from playing 300/400 mid/high stake stts online every day for 5 years to literally never playing online poker at all now apart from dtd sats.  Dropping down to stakes where i still had an edge after rake would make my hourly so low it wasn't worth it from an income point of view doing it so i just moved onto other income streams.  If i had chosen Hansen's route i would be skint now.  It's very hard when you have spent 80/100 hours a week for 5 years doing this to admit this but i think it takes a much stronger person to do this than to just carry on smashing away with no edge like Hansen has.

Having a public image/ego the size of Hansen must make it 100 times harder to stop playing his games and i can easily understand how mentally it fucks you up when you can't beat the games.  When you have a bullshit 'hero' image to maintain to your fan boys it must be even harder if you fall for all that PR bullshit.  There is such an image stigma about poker players and all the bullshit reasons you hear for why they don't play as much as before etc etc.  Virtually always the reason is they are doing their cash/can't beat the games like they used to do AND are not willing to put the hours of training/learning into the game to keep up.  You have to do this to stand still never mind improve.  Guys from 10 years ago are not used to this level of work ethic generally, don't want to put the time in and go skint.  The ones who like to pretend they are still capable of beating the games go skint whilst the ones that lose the ego/image and stop caring what people think about them can move onto other income streams in areas where they have an edge.

So good. Was loving watching that ;-)

Believe Tom Dwan is losing/knocking it in at a decent rate also Tikay.

He has actually lost over $20 million. The $17 million figure was just for the period after he rejoined Full Tilt post black friday. I just wrote a piece today actually (live on saturday) about how an entire high stakes economy can be propped up by one person like Gus, or Guy, or Andy Beal etc. He hasnt played for a month and the nosebleed games have died.

These losses are since about 2007, so before that, who knows?

FYI from every nosebleed player I have asked, the site that records these results (HighstakesDB) is about 95% accurate. I'm pretty certain if Gus had not lost that much, he or FTP would have made a point of saying so.

Fun pop fact though, he is actually the biggest recorded winner in online stud games.

As a shareholder for FTP of old, I'm sure he had a bit of a buffer for those 20 million wins.

It would seem logical to assume he was winning pre 2007.

Russian oligarchs like to play pretty big at backgammon

How big that someone is comfortable punting off circa $5m a year playing poker?

$5,000,350?

Not leaving a huge amount for living expenses there.

He lives in Monaco not Sheffield ;)

Whoa there, Sheffield isn't some horrible poverty stricken industrial scene from Kes you know.

We have a Nandos now.

In doesn't get any better than that.

In Sheffield I mean. It literally doesn't...

Gus isn't a fish. However you play 8-game against the very best 8-game players, 2-7 vs the very best 2-7 players and O8 vs the very bet O8 players all at 2k/4k you're likely gonna do your money.

He sold that poker site to ?betfair? For €25m a while back did he not(think he had two partners....) He'd have made a lot of money from FTP over the years  and even with his $20m FTP deficit I'd be pretty confident he's still a big lifetime winner from gambling.

I know 100% (he actually told me at a poker table) he as a regular backgammon opponent where they play €6,000 a point "and it's an aggro game" lol. (Would go 4x or 8x a lot I imagine)

he also sold a book

The only sure way to figure out Gus's networth is to ask "What Lodden thinks"