Gus Hansen has been the story of the 2011 winners. Through the first half of 2011, when it came to professional players’ earnings, he was the far and away the name on top. Black Friday’s repercussions haven’t helped any of the U.S. based players. Celebrity poker players like Phil ‘OMGClayAiken’ Galfond, Phil Ivey, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan, and Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates have all disappeared from the nosebleed tables, essentially dismissing them from the current leader boards.
Now, for the first time in 2011, Gus Hansen has fallen from the top spot, dethroned by Patrik Antonius. According to highstakesdb.com, Antonius is the second most profitable online poker player of all time. Climbing up on the earnings chart is no new experience for him. The beginning of 2011 saw him plummet more than $1 million into the red. His re-emergence after such a start is a remarkable turnaround.
Antonius posted a $900k profit this past week, catching Hansen in the middle of a prolonged downswing. Once up $4 million, Hansen has dropped to $2.5 million in winnings. Antonius, thanks to his almost-million-dollar week, is now at $2.8 million in profit for the year.
While Hansen and Antonius jockey for first position, Swedish phenomenon Viktor “Isildur1” Blom has shown his face for the first time since Black Friday. Blom played 1,576 hands of heads up PLO to pull in a winning session netting a hefty $183k. Blom is nowhere near posting the kind of year Hansen and Antonius are having so far, but based on his history of wild swings and hot streaks, a comeback on the level of Antonius’s is far from impossible.