Gus Hansen started it with a taunting tweet. Daniel Negreanu finished it with a sweep.
Actually, it was Negreanu, Isaac Haxton, and Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, otherwise known as Team PokeStars, who swept their rivals, Full Tilt’s The Professionals comprising of Hansen, Viktor “Isildur1” Blom, and Tom Dwan in the highly anticipated albeit a little overrated “The Professionals vs Team PokerStars” battleship-style laptop challenge at the EPT London inside the Grosvenor Victoria Casino.
It was heavily built up as a clash of poker titans but in the end, Team PokerStars took the hammer and swung mightily at the head of The Professionals, pulling off an impressive 3-0 sweep and collecting $150,000 in the process.
The event pitted the three PokerStars pros against their Full Tilt counterparts in a three-table, heads-up No-Limit Hold’em match against one designated opponent with $50,000 on the line for each heads-up battle. The first player to win 2 of 3 in each matchup would win a point for their respective teams. It was set-up for a dramatic finish between Negreanu and Hansen, the two “captains” of their respective teams. But Haxton and Grospellier made sure that Team PokerStars ended on its own terms, winning six of the seven matches against Blom and Dwan with the latter accounting for the only win chalked up on the side of The Professionals.
Grospellier even made quick work of Isildur1, regarded as one of the best heads-up No-Limit Hold’em players in the world, in three straight events. From there, it was all downhill for The Professionals with Haxton taking two out of three matches against Dwan, giving Team PokerStars the overall win even before Negreanu and Hansen took the felt.
Despite having already won the event, Negreanu still took out Hansen in all of their events, pushing Team PokerStars’ total to eight wins against only one loss.
It was a very impressive win by Negreanu and company with the results expected to be talked about in the poker circuit for quite some time. It’s also something that we’re confident Kid Poker will have no problem reminding Gus Hansen about in future tweets.
What goes around does come around.
