In some ways the Ocean View Card Room, a small club in Santa Cruz, CA, can be credited with causing changes in the way poker is played today. When televised poker took the world by storm in the early years of this decade, it changed the way poker, as we know it, is played. In order to increase the viability of televised poker, the producers of shows such as the World Poker Tour and Poker Superstars knew that what sells on TV is the wild, unpredictable play of hyper-aggressive players.

In poker, our first mentors are normally the ones that impact us the most. In 1993, a nineteen-year-old foreign exchange student became a Banana Slug at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At the time, he was a prominent junior level tennis player in his native Denmark and a world class Backgammon player. Though he had played cards for nickels and dimes as a kid at camp, it was not his game of choice.

In the early nineties, it had been less than a decade since California changed its gaming laws and allowed games other than Lo-ball to be played in card rooms. Texas Hold'em was still a game for high-stakes players and the World Series of Poker Main Event. The game of choice for most card rooms was seven-card stud, but a game gaining in popularity since its introduction in Las Vegas in 1982 was Omaha Hold'em or, more commonly, Omaha and its sister, Omaha Hi-Lo.

Not long after arriving on campus at Santa Cruz, Gus was introduced to the game of Omaha at the Ocean View. The games played there were often wild affairs, with the games becoming some of the loosest and most aggressive games in the country. It has been said that if you could beat the game at the Ocean View, you could beat it anywhere.

Omaha is a game of intense action, which appealed to the adrenaline junkie in Gus. As a novice player, he played Omaha as he had played poker at summer camp and it cost him dearly. Another problem Gus had was an incomplete grasp of English, so he could not understand the idiosyncrasies of all that was being said around him. To offset this, he learned to watch and read his opponents’ body language and mannerisms. This ended up helping his poker game. He began noticing that one player in particular was especially hard to get a read on. This player's erratic play often confused others at the table and was a style of play that intrigued Gus, so he began adopting it. This new style fit in nicely with his inherent gambler psyche. This change in style, at an admittedly loose club, was the foundation for what was later seen on television. However, Gus’s academic and card room run came to an end when he had to return to his native Denmark to serve his mandatory nine-months service in the military.    

A decade later, one of the first superstar celebrity players to come out of televised poker was Gus Hansen, poker’s irascible ‘Great Dane.’ His perceived maniacal, unpredictable and unreadable style of play changed the face of poker in 2002 when he took the televised poker world by storm, winning the World Poker Tour’s inaugural Five-Diamond World Poker Classic at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Within two seasons, he had won three WPT titles and the initial Poker Superstars introducing his perceived maniacal, unpredictable and unreadable style. Because of Gus' initial success, his style was immediately copied by millions of impressionable young players.

What these players did not take into consideration was that the style of play seen at the final table of a WPT event is not the same style that it takes to get to the final table. Additionally, television likes to exploit the hands that make electrifying viewing. The miracle two-out draw that hits on the river for a million chips makes great TV, so it gets the air time, while the solid player is not as exciting and only gets air time when being sucked out on by the maniac. Though Gus is unarguably a loose-aggressive player, he is not as crazed as it appears on television. He often calculates when best to amplify his aggression to throw off his opponents. His ability to get an exceptional read on his opponents, coupled with his inherent gambling mentality, can be traced back to his formative days in Santa Cruz's Ocean View Card Room.

This article is an excerpt taken from “Winning Blue-Collar Hold’em” by Daniel L. Cox. Available at Amazon.com.