Full Tilt Poker's Two Biggest Pros Can't Win!
August 26, 2014 12:07 pmFull Tilt Poker may have two of the biggest names in the game as its official brand ambassadors, but they also happen to be two of the biggest losers in the online game with Gus Hansen currently showing a -$19,620,039 loss since May 2007, and Viktor Blom down -$3,445,408 since Oct 2009. Whereas Gus Hansen’s poker graph on highstakesdb.com shows a pretty steady decline, Blom’s has more ups and downs than the Grand Old Duke of York, with both players’ graphs a cautionary tale as to the volatility and potential pitfalls of playing high stakes cash games against the world’s best.
In fact, it’s now got to such a point that many in the poker community are wondering what it actually means to be a poker professional these days, and as one poster named Ben4 commented on cardplayer.com, recently:
“Funny that FullTilts 2 biggest sponsored pros cant win. You’d think from a marketing perspective they would dump these guys and go a different direction.”
To be fair, Gus Hansen has won $11,258,052 from live tournaments, although the past couple of years haven’t been so impressive with the ‘Great Dane’ having won $30,605 in 2013, and just $17,376 this year so far. Online is a different matter and one can only imagine the mixed feelings Gus experiences when contemplating how things may have been different if Full Tilt Poker hadn’t relaunched in 2012 and he didn’t subsequently go on to drop a further staggering -$16,413,305 (-$3.21m before Black-Friday).
Giving a clue as to the reasons for his spectacular fall, Gus Hansen admits to not using any HUD or tracking software, just like fellow ambassador Viktor Blom, and also to having “just about the worst game selection in the world.”
Meanwhile, Viktor Blom’s results since joining FTP have been a mixed bag as the following stats show: -$2,216,177 in 2009, -$414,053 in 2010, +$413,544 in 2012, +$542,796 in 2013, and -$1,771,518 so far in 2014. However, Blom often seems able to rack up huge profits at the beginning of the past few years, before spectacularly giving much of it away later down the line.
Having said all that, the online poker game continues to get tougher to beat at an alarming rate and even Phil ‘Polarizing’ Ivey hasn’t been able to work his magic and has lost -$1,842,390 on FTP so far in 2014. Therefore, maybe its time for Hansen to accept the reality of the modern online game, and profit from his own observation when he lamented:
“You just have to be better than the others at your table. Of course, people have been getting better and better. This is not 2003 anymore, and it sure isn’t 1995.”