Jesper Hougaard dominated at the final table of his $1,500 no-limit hold'em event (No. 36). He took over the proceedings with an aggressive style, and not even Danny Wong could slow him down. It looked like he would coast to his first bracelet until he got heads up with Cody Slaubaugh, and then all of his momentum was crushed. Hougaard was bluffed out of a large pot. He began to freefall and lost multiple large pots in a row. The dinner break came to the rescue though, and Hougaard was able to collect his thoughts and return to his dominant-aggressive self to win the bracelet and $610,304 in prize money. Card Player caught up with Hougaard at the post final-table press conference and he spoke about his background, who first inspired him to play poker, and what he did on the dinner break to regroup.
Question: What did you do prior to becoming a professional player?
Jesper Hougaard: I played and coached professional table tennis in Denmark for the national team for quite a few years. When poker took over I got really interested in that and it took up too much of my time so I gave up table tennis and started focusing on poker instead.
Q: How did your competitive table tennis background prepare you for tournament poker?
JH: Believe it or not, you can really reflect back on a couple of things. I’ve been in this situation before, where you have to regroup. You saw at the final table today I was in bad, bad shape…basically what I did is something we used to do for table tennis is regroup, prepare yourself, and think about it like it’s a new match. That’s a mental exercise for preparing yourself again that really helped me out.
Q: When did you start playing poker?
JH: I started when Gus Hansen started getting ahead on the World Poker Tour. Poker just exploded in Denmark, we saw this guy who became a household name from one day to the other. We started off in school playing just small, live games. If you won $20, $30, $40 in a night you were just the king of the school the next day. That’s where I started playing and then I took to online pretty quickly because there isn’t too much opportunity to play live where I live other than home games. So I took to playing online and I thought if I got really good at this game I could make a living from it, and that’s what I’m doing now.
Q: Was it really good having the scheduled dinner break after the horrible run where you lost some crucial hands heads up?
JH: Absolutely, I had to insist on the dinner break. Because I felt things were really changing and going so quickly against me…The dinner break came just in time for me…I don’t know what else I would have done, maybe I would have stalled, left the table, maybe got anteed off, because I really needed to take 5-10 minutes and regroup with my thoughts.
Q: What did you do on the dinner break to regroup, because you came back after dinner a new player and took back control?
JH: I felt I played such a good final table...All day through I was in control, I pretty much dominated the table and the only guy who had a lot of chips was Cody [Slaubaugh] and he kind of stayed out of my way. I pretty much cruised to heads up. Once I started losing the chip lead I felt I started losing grip of the match. I went out to dinner with my friends and I phoned my brother back at home, I phoned my dad, I tried to phone my girlfriend but I think she fell asleep. I spoke to some people back at home to just to clear my mind and think about something other than poker. Then there was 15 minutes left in the break so I put on my headphones and put on “Eye of the Tiger” and just kind of shadow boxed my way back down to the Rio.
Q: Earlier in the day you were really the aggressive force at the table. Did you sense weakness in your opponents? What led you to play so aggressively?
JH: I hit the flops pretty well. I flopped a straight, I flopped a flush, and in general I hit the flops. I did make some bluffs. I made one pretty sick bluff on Danny [Wong] where he bet on all three streets and I raised him on the river. I had a missed straight draw, I had 8-high and apparently he folded a rivered straight…That was my only really big bluff, apart from that I pretty much had the hands. Obviously I thought there were two, three, maybe four weak spots at the table that I could bully. And then, I just stayed out of the way of the other big stacks until about five-handed play. Then I had position on Danny, which was great for me because he was the only guy who wanted to see flops and he was out of position to me all the time which gave me a huge advantage.
Q: We see a lot of the Scandinavian players use a hyper-aggressive strategy. Is that true of your personal game and that of your countrymen?
JH: Absolutely, absolutely, I mean when we travel, we don’t play that many live tournaments in Denmark because there aren’t that many big tournaments to play, but when we travel people are commenting on it everywhere we go because we have a different style, which is much more aggressive, puts pressure on people, and I think it’s the way to play. All the top players play like that and all of the Scandinavians play like that.
