If January is any indication, 2010 is going to be nothing like 2009 in the world of online high-sakes poker.
Last year, we saw Gus Hansen lose piles of money, while Patrick Antonius was raking it in faster than he could spend it. In the first month of this year, the two players switched roles.
Hansen was up more than $1.7 million for the month, playing over 29,000 tracked hands. That came on the heels of a self-imposed, albeit very short, break from online poker for the Dane, who had racked up losses of more than $5.5 million in 2009 over the course of a quarter of a million hands.
Whether the break did Hansen some good (he said he would use the time away to work on his game) or if his luck just turned, we’ll never know. But it is clear that he’s back on the upswing. However, Hansen had a hot start to 2009, too. He was up about $3 million for the year at one point before going on a massive downswing.
On the other side of the coin, it was riches to rags for Antonius, who had posted nearly $9 million in profit last year. But 2010 got off to a rough start for the Finn, who was down about $1.7 million for nearly 15,000 tracked hands in January.
Antonius is no stranger to down swings, and it would be pretty shocking to see one of the best players in the game give back money for an extended period of time. Part of Antonius’ bad month can be chalked up to Tom “durrrr” Dwan, who now leads the “durrrr Challenge” with Antonius by a million dollars.
Hansen led all players on Full Tilt for the money, although four others posted profits north of a million dollars, including Cole South ($1.5M), Di “Urindanger” Dang ($1.2M), Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies ($1.1M) and Alexander “PostflopAction” Kostritsyn ($1M). Ziigmund had a solid year in 2009 and is looking to build on that momentum.
Also of note on the good side of even: Erick Lindgren ($340K) who doesn’t usually appear in the roll call for high-stakes cash games at the end of each month), and Brian Hastings ($335K) who famously took $4 million from “Isildur1″ near the end of 2009.
No one other than Antonius posted losses of more than a million. Richard Ashby was second in net losses, with $800K given back in January.
