Dani Stern – Ansky

Anyone involved in online poker will be well aware of the exploits of Dani ‘Ansky’ Stern.

The 21 yearold has been around for longer than his age belies (having made his first PokerStars cash back in May 2004) but wasted no time in making a meteoric rise to the top of the internet scene, where he plays on Full Tilt as ‘Ansky451’ and Stars as ‘supernova9’.

Having grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to a father who writes and a high school teaching mother, Stern doesn’t have obvious poker credentials. Indeed, he was a selfconfessed sports nut in high school, with baseball and soccer being his preferred pasttimes. But after struggling to make the sporting grade in college, Stern deposited $50 into an online account with a friend and has never looked back.

He made the standard sit and go to MTT to cash route (saying that a $3,400 second in a big PartyPoker tourney was his biggest catalyst) and now you can find him regularly beating the shorthanded $25/$50 NLH games on Stars and FT. However, ‘Ansky451’ has been spotted in the $500/$1000 ‘Rail Heaven’ games recently so he could become a nosebleed regular in the not too distant future.

After starting playing ‘seriously’ in 2006, Stern has made the cash games his bread and butter, though he has continued to perform spectacularly in the large buyin tournaments throughout his young career. For a primarily cash player to have prizes of over $600,000 on Stars & FT is a stunning achievement in itself. On Stars, he has taken down the $100 rebuys (May 2007, $28,188) & a $5,000 winner takes all (Aug 2008, $30,000) in his time, as well as finishing runnerup in last years WCOOP ‘second chance’ for $63,941. And on Full Tilt he has come runnerup in the $1k Monday (July 2007, $37,620) as well as finishing 6th in May’s massive $25,000 HeadsUp Championship for a cool $96,000 (eventually won by David Singer).

Having turned 21 we would expect Stern’s live tournament winnings of $35,000 to increase considerably – though he did cash in last years EPT Barcelona (56th, $14,354) as well as in the 2008 WSOP $10,000 HeadsUp Championship (31st, $21,657).

But more than being ‘just another’ young high stakes professional, Stern made different headlines in January when he published an essay entitled ‘An Open Letter to the Community and Beyond on Integrity’ on several wellrenowned forums. In it, he details the PokerRoad podcast appearance of Josh ‘JJProdigy’ Field, when he was interviewed by his friends Gavin Smith & Joe Sebok. He was highly critical of Field not only admitting to multiaccounting over the previous 2 years, but of not ruling out the possibility of doing it again in the future. Smith & Sebok were also not exempt from criticism for admitting to knowledge of previous ‘immoral’ practices in the live poker community. The piece was widely praised across the board, with Cardrunners’ Lee Jones (among others) replying with: “As many of you have noted, Ansky nailed it…. I wrote a Card Player piece on the same subject some time ago. Let’s hope the general tide of opinion is turning.”

A poker player with a conscience? Surely not.

Stern is a student at Montreal’s McGill University but it’s hard to not call him a professional player even now: he has been a coach at the increasingly successful Poker Savvy training site for well over a year and has a regular blog at Card Player. Given his poker exploits and position in the industry, its hard not to imagine him devoting all of his attention to the game after he graduates.