About Thor Hansen

Thor Hansen's gift for numbers was apparent at a young age. In his family's grocery store in Norway, at only 8 years old, he would add up sale items. In the grocery's back room, the young Thor watched his brother and father playing poker with other townspeople. Thor says of those days: "Every time they took a break from playing, I would sit in the hand and play a little. They figured out I was good at it because when they returned they always found that I was sitting there with more money than when they left."

Though he left school and started working in a hotel at just 13, Thor says he consistently earned more dough by playing poker and pool. Thor recounts an anecdote from his days as a pro billiards player: "In 1973, I played on Norwegian television against a three-time world champion from the United States. When I beat him, he complained about the rules we were playing by, so then we played by his rules, and I beat him again."

Pool quickly yielded to poker in Thor's life because it was less lucrative. For many years, he played backroom cash games and in 1988 he decided to enter his first tournament, the Scandinavian Championship of Poker, which was held in Dubrovnik due to an inconvenient lack of legality in the Scandinavian countries. He place first and was scouted by a promoter for the World Series of Poker as well as other tournaments. That man invited Thor to Las Vegas where on the strength of his title as Scandinavian champion he earned a seat at the WSOP.

Thor racked up several more tournament victories and moved to Los Angeles where he married a Norwegian-born American. He then met publisher Larry Flynt. Thor says of that time: "The same friends who invited me to come to America, also invited me to Larry Flynt's house to play high stakes poker. The first time I played there, I also played with Jerry Buss, the owner of the L.A. Lakers. This was the first time that Larry Flynt had played in 15 years."

Larry Flynt and Thor Hansen became friends; in fact, Flynt is sometimes Hansen's backer for high stakes cash games. Eventually, Larry invited Thor to be a poker host at Hustler Casino, where Thor is a regular to this day. Though he recently spent some years concentrating on cash games, Thor says that he is going back to the tournaments: "The tournaments have grown so large, I can't afford not to play." He also enjoys other forms of gambling, such as horse race betting, but he admits that his strongest suit is poker. Thor speaks of his own game with a confidence befitting a Norse God: "I know what to do, who to play, what to play, and when to quit."

Trivia

• Former pro pool player
• Plays poker regularly with Larry Flynt and Jerry Buss
• Worked as a "human calculator"
• Good friend of Stu Ungar in the Eighties
• Played in the highest stakes cash games