Galfond Ends Hansen’s Winning Streak, Starts His Own

The weekend’s barely begun, and yet the online high stakes tables have already seen plenty of significant action. Two of this year’s most newsworthy high stakes players – Phil Galfond and Gus Hansen – were hitting the felt early this week, but their results were anything but expected. Galfond’s been busy digging himself a multi-million dollar hole while Hansen’s been burning up the nosebleeds, but over the last few days the pair traded places as each tried the other end of the odds.

For the first time in months it’s been nothing but good news for Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond as he racked up one of the largest mid-week winning streaks of 2018. If he continues to play this well through the weekend then Galfond will not only easily be this week’s biggest winner, he’ll put himself back into the black at the PLO and NLHE tables for the year. As of today, he’s up an impressive $692,355 from combined winnings at both PokerStars and Full Tilt.

Galfond’s biggest bankroll donors included Van “Sirens” Marcus and Scott “URnotINdanger2” Palmer, the latter of which will also be facing off against Viktor “Isildur1” Blom this Sunday in a new edition of the SuperStar Showdown. Perhaps the most unlikely opponent to have the hurt put on them by Galfond, though, was Gus Hansen. Up until this week, Hansen seemed unstoppable. In only a couple months he’s raked in millions in online winnings, but that streak came to a crashing halt when he came up against Galfond at a $300/$600 Omaha table at Full Tilt on Tuesday.

On Tuesday night alone Galfond played 2,195 hands and earned well over half a million from that single grind session. That said, a sizable chunk of those profits can be ascribed to just two big hands he won against the Great Dane. In one, both players went all-in and ran the river twice to create a $98,393 pot that went entirely to Galfond. In the second major hand of the match-up, after Hansen had renewed his stack he once again went all in and ran the river twice only to watch Galfond walk away with all of the $168,785 pot.

Galfond’s also been rebuilding his bankroll at the 2-7 Draw tables, and branching out into that format has served him well as he’s won at least $1.6 million off them in the last month. Meanwhile, Hansen failed to find purchase with any of his opponents after Galfond and ended up cutting his Team Full Tilt table time short. Though he’s well in the red for the week, he’s still $4 million ahead for the year which is easily enough to keep him on top of the online year-to-date earnings tally.

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