Gus Hansen is one of the circuits leading pro players and one of the “Team” on Full Tilt Poker – regularly playing high stakes 7 Card Stud and Texas Hold’em with the likes of Tom “Drrrr” Dwan and Phil Ivey. In this book review we take a look at Gus Hansen’s Every Hand Revealed.
Title: Every Hand Revealed
Author: Gus Hansen
Paperback: 370 pages
Publisher: Citadel (May 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0818407271
ISBN-13: 978-0818407277
Incredibly, Hansen does not have the “household name” associated with many of poker’s leading lights, despite being 20th on the all-time money list with over $7.1 million in career tournament earnings, winner of the 2007 Aussie Millions Main Event, the only player ever to win four WPT titles and having acquired a reputation of being an ultra-loose aggressive “Madman”.
Quite often, players defeated by Hansen have described him as a very bad player, and often questioned “What was he thinking?” when he played a specific hand. With “Every Hand Revealed” Hansen chronicles his victory in the 2007 Aussie Millions from the beginning of Day 1 to victory in the two hour Heads Up battle against 19 year-old internet prodigy, Jimmy “Gobboboy” Fricke, explaining frequently, and with great humour, about what was actually going on in his head whilst playing some of his more outrageous bets.
Overall, 329 hands are discussed, with particular reference to the 21 he describes as “crucial”, which were pivotal to his success in the tournament. It is refreshing to see the examination of live hands played in tournaments (not just the TV highlights) rather than getting a lot of theory and retrospective inspection – as Hansen says in his introduction, “I am yet to come across a book that convincingly presents a viable poker strategy based on practise, not theory”, and cheekily concludes his book with a chapter cheekily entitled “Stats and Tips for all My Fellow Poker Nerds.”
There are some interesting strategies expanded on throughout the book including zeroing in on opponents´ tendencies, exploiting position pre-flop but not so much post flop to present a false impression, and understanding the significance of blind/ante structure and how it relates to your own chip stack. Hansen invites you into his head as he explains how he uses maths and logic to calculate his odds of winning the pot, and then relies on gut instinct and does something completely different. Whether he got the call right or wrong, he writes with such endearing charm and deadpan humor that, by the end of the book, you are cheering him on and celebrating as he wins the final hand.
By far, one of the most entertaining books you will find on tournament play in poker and strongly recommended.
Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen is available from Amazon.com.
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