Image courtesy of World Poker Tour
The aftermath of the World Series of Poker is different for every player. While professionals take stock of their profits and losses across their trip, recreational players might have a photo stream to edit, and those who played their first event are probably still buzzing from playing in the biggest WSOP of all-time.
For poker professional and Crush Live Poker owner Bart Hanson, the series marked the 15th time he’d played the Main Event, and we caught up with him this week to discuss this year’s WSOP.
A Love Affair with the Main Event
Bart’s first Main Event was in 2007, in the heady era of the ‘poker boom’ that came as a result of the Moneymaker Effect year of 2003. Strangely, considering he’s played the Main Event 14 more times since, it was his best ever result.
I finished 115th and it was also the year I reached my first final table at one of the huge original $1,500 events (coming fourth in the Monster Stack for $344,079).
That event had over 6,000 people, at the time it was the biggest event that had ever happened since the previous Main Event. It was on ESPN and it jumpstarted my broadcasting career.
Bart is now well-known as a high stakes cash game commentator on Hustler Casino Live as well as providing insights and guidance for tournament poker players at Criush Live Poker. The six-time WSOP final tablist is proud of how the younger version of himself took to televised poker.
I had done Live at the Bike but my showing on TV for that event got me recognized with Poker Road, which I parlayed into a deep run,” he tells us. “I’ve cashed maybe four out of the 15 times [in the Main Event].
The only two years I didn’t play it were firstly in in 2011 when I was doing broadcasting for ESPN and secondly in the year after COVID in 2021 because of my first child being born.
That year, of course, saw the Main Event moved to November, but Bart rightly put being beside his wife during labor first. As he tells us today, however, the last couple of years have seen him take advantage of the new Day 2 buy-in facility.
If I was in Vegas, I’d play the Day 1, but I’ve played it 15 times and living on the East Coast with young children, it makes it really worthwhile playing Day 2d. I think it’s something I’m always going to do unless my entire family is out in Las Vegas.
Busting out from the Main Event is a painful experience for anyone but for Bart, it comes with a yearly tradition of smoking a post-bustout cigar.
I went to a special event in the Dominican Republic at the Fuentes factory and their tobacco plantation, and I got some very special Opus X cigars that I smoked with Andrew, who built the first version of my website.
Andrew came out to WSOP and played the Main Event for the first time. I got knocked out on Day 2 for possibly the first time – I usually make it pretty deep – but I was happy with the way I played.
The Not-So Beautiful Bill
Recent plans in politics for a so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ have worried poker players, who are concerned about potentially damaging changes to gambling tax.
“It’s unfortunate that this provision about your losses being basically capped at 90% and you can only deduct 90% of your losses are being jammed into the one ‘Big Beautiful Bill’“, says Bart.
It reminds me of what happened with the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) of 2006 that killed online poker a few years later. That provision got jammed in the back of a port security act by a guy named Bill Frist that was gonna run for President, and then he didn’t end up running for president against Obama.
[Frist] wanted to pander to the Christian right. Now we wake up in the morning and that thing has been shoved in the Senate version and then it got passed in the Senate.”
While Bart and many others in poker, such as Doug Polk and Phil Galfond, are concerned about the potential for this provisional change to gambling tax the poker community – and to an extent the public, are in uproar.”
Doug Polk did an interview with the senator from Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto and she has introduced a bill that Ted Cruz has actually gotten on. So there is bipartisan support that would strip this provision from the one big beautiful bill.
Sometimes when these big reconciliation bills get put forth, there’ll be laws that will come in and take some of the unpopular provisions out – I’m hopeful that this provision will be taken out. It would hurt a lot of poker players, more so professionals than recreational players.
As Bart describes, losing years for poker professionals could be much more damaging than recreational players, who would offset their losses against their main profession.
The way that you’re supposed to file recreationally is so unfair that almost no one actually files that way; it promotes noncompliance because you can be a net loser or break even and have these adverse effects with your overall tax return happen.
As a recreational player, you can end up with more tax liability because you’re forced to itemize your deductions. All sorts of gambling tax rules have been unfair forever.
A Passion for Mixed Games
Like so many who have loved being in poker for many years, Bart is a keen advocate of mixed games and regularly plays them at large festivals such as the WSOP. That was true this summer in Las Vegas.
I love high low but I’m a weird combination. I play no limit cash and tournaments, and I play Omaha 8 and study so Hi-Lo but you won’t find me like playing draw or like 8-game and 10-game mix. I’m nowhere near as good as some of the best players in the world.
I used to play limit Omaha 8, like back in the day, in some of the biggest games. We used to play $75/$150 cash games – that was my main game of the WSOP.
Bart loves Mixed O8 now, with blinds often a third of the size that they might be compared to a straight $1,500 PL08 event or a $10,000 Big O tournament. Going deep in six of the eight times the WSOP has hosted such events, Bart got close to winning it this summer just gone.
I was the chip leader with 25 or 30 people left and I don’t know what happened on the last day. I don’t know if we accidentally skipped some levels between Day 2 and Day 3 and nobody noticed it, but the levels on Day 3 weren’t what they were supposed to be or how they were published in the app.
It ended up being an accelerated Day 3. I lost a couple of hands and I was out, which is disappointing because the great thing about that tournament is that it moves slowly, usually.
What Makes a Good Poker Player?
Earlier in the year, Bart hosted an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session where he visited a theme of how good poker players don’t only need intelligence but other qualities to supplement those foundations to poker success.
I think number one thing would be emotional control. An intelligent recreational player might struggle with this, especially if they don’t play that much. It can affect the way that you play later on. It’s a mental game thing that happens in golf and that’s probably the biggest parallel.
Bart credits patience and using real time math during gameplay as vital attributes to the successful player too.
You can be an intelligent person and not be good at doing math in your head, especially under pressure. They might have fast computing skills and be successful businessmen, but they’re just not necessarily good at that.
Maybe to a lesser extent [it’s] a little bit of ‘card sense’ and reading people. I’m not as big physical tells as some other people, but there are certainly some bet patterns and bet pacing [traits] that you can pick up and that comes with experience.
Crushing Live Poker
After all these years, it’s clear that one of Bart’s biggest passions is helping others improve their poker game at the felt.
The growth of Crush Live Poker is a source of real pride and Bart has invested a huge amount of time and effort into the project, something poker players always respect. They recognize that anyone who invests their time in poker coaching has to work incredibly hard to bring that product to market.
I still love doing Crush Live Poker,” says Bart. I’ve done a weekly strategy podcast since 2008 and I worked for a training site called Deuces Cracked between 2002 and 2012 before launching my own site.
Every single year, Crush Live Poker has had growth with the exception of during COVID. After the pandemic, we launched a new ‘Version 2’ of Crush Live Poker and that went really, really well.
Real-time assistance is a spiky topic in poker, but Bart is hyper-aware of the influence it will have on poker training and how sites like Crush Live Poker can adapt to be future-proof.
We’re talking about AI (Artificial Intelligence) combined with real time assistance and real time solving, he says. Right now, the biggest training site is GTO Wizard, a kind of a pre-solved solver. You can enter your hand and see the GTO way to play a certain line.
If they build some sort of poker robot where you could just enter any hand history and it could give you an output that was pretty accurate and also account for population exploits and things like that, it would affect all training sites, maybe with the exception of GTO Wizard.
While AI is bound to have a big impact on poker training sites, Bart is determined that whatever comes, he can make the necessary adjustments to keep Crush Live Poker thriving. His experience in private lessons – which he admits are rarer these days – stands him in good stead to listen to the individual player as well as collective poker trends.
I did a bunch of private lessons in China in February with some of the richest people in the world, Bart tells us. I was railing some of the largest games in the world in Macau, the equivalent to $20,000/$40,000 NLHE.
I enjoyed doing that with very, very high stakes clients that were losing and I kind of brought them up to break even or slight winners with some basic stuff – I think that’s really where my forte is.
Most of Bart’s training modules are geared towards the $2/$5 live player rather than the mega-rich, however. He believes that it is possible that AI replaces the one-to-one tuition of old, especially if computer models in development can cut the cost of going from amateur to intermediate ‘by 90%’ as he suspects.
We’re definitely going to see like a whole new era of poker training and coaching that could be powered by computers. Like I said, I will try to adjust the best that I can.
I have years and years of experience that a poker computer might not have unless [it can] take down very, very accurate population stats or scrape live streams and feed it into a solver. I’ll make the adjustment.
The Future of the WSOP
After 100 WSOP bracelet events that have produced almost as many winners (we applaud you, multiple winners such as Benny Glaser), Bart’s six final tables at the World Series are a source of pride but he now sees the dream of winning a WSOP bracelet as aligned with his coaching goals.
I was never really into the ‘novelty’ of winning a bracelet. There are so many bracelets now, especially with the online ones and low buy-in events.
Besides the Monster Stack in 2019 where I got fourth, I haven’t really come really close to winning a bracelet but I do feel like in some of these specialty types of events, I have a really, really good shot.
Tournaments such as the Mixed O8 will always appeal to the creative brain of Bart Hanson, just as developing technology does in his business life.
He sees WSOP success now as validation for his foray into poker coaching and of course, the monetary benefits of winning big at the WSOP. He says that even if the WSOP bend to the will of most players and allow chops heads-up, he wouldn’t be keen.
I don’t think that I’m going to be giving away a bunch of money to the guy that I’m playing against to make sure that I win the bracelet like some people do. With a 2:1 chip lead, they then decide to chop it in half to win the bracelet.
I don’t think I’m ever doing that, because money is still like the main driving force of these tournaments.
With Bart Hanson sure to push his poker profile ever higher in the next 12 months, maybe the next year may prove the biggest yet. One of poker’s most adaptable good guys is sure to be relentless in his pursuit of glory all over again.
