Up until last October, Gus Hansen was regarded as one of the biggest fish in high stakes online poker. I mean the guy lost over $7 million playing online, and was at the center of numerous stories bashing his skills. Phil Galfond even went as far as to say that Hansen was the sole reason why the biggest games at Full Tilt Poker existed. I personally wondered why Hansen didn’t just stick to focusing on live tournaments where he’s earned over $9.1 million during his career.
In any case, Hansen seems to be getting the last laugh since he’s went on a $5 million tear that began towards the end of last year. October is when Hansen really stepped his game up as he started ripping up the $500/$1,000 PLO games; Hansen has earned almost $2 million playing these games.
Interestingly enough, Hansen’s biggest victim during this time has been last year’s most successful player in Dan “jungleman12” Cates. Cates burst onto the high stakes scene in ’09 when he proved to be quite successful while playing against the game’s best online players. In 2010, Cates made more money than any other player when he banked $5 million in profits; not bad for a guy who was working at McDonald’s three years ago!
Unfortunately, variance is taking over for Cates because he has lost almost $900k to Hansen as of late. David Benefield has been donating a lot to the Gus Hansen comeback fund too since he’s dropped $477k to Hansen over the last four months.
So far, Hansen is far and away the top player in online poker since he has $2 million in profits this year. With that money, he should have no trouble taking his super hot girlfriend, Caroline Wozniacki, out on plenty of nice dates.
