Dani Stern is one of the top young talents in poker, both online and live. The Deuces Cracked poker coach has a fearsome reputation as a tough No Limit Holdem player, and has been featured on a number of television shows including the G4 biographic/reality show 2 Months 2 Million, as well as appearances on High Stakes Poker, Poker After Dark, and the PokerStars.net Big Game where he got into it with Phil Hellmuth in a classic confrontation.

Stern uses the screen-name ‘Ansky451’ on Full Tilt Poker and ‘Supernova9’ on PokerStars, but he is most commonly referred to by the shortened form of his Full Tilt moniker, Ansky –which he also uses on the 2+2 poker forum.

As a lead instructor at Deuces Cracked (Stern carries the title of Executive Producer), Stern produces a lot of the sites mid to high-stakes NLHE content, including videos of him taking on durrrr and other top players. He has also become known as one of the best poker minds in the business when it comes to explaining difficult concepts and analyzing situations. Currently Ansky has created 24 videos for Deuces Cracked.

Stern was born in New York City on November 18, 1986. Stern was highly competitive as a youngster –perhaps due to his older brother—and played both soccer and baseball in high school. A good student throughout high school, Stern attended McGill University in Canada but quickly lost interest as his enthusiasm for poker increased. Stern left school with just three semesters remaining before graduation. Like most parents, Stern’s were not thrilled with his decision to leave school as he told Card Player Magazine in November 2009:
“The way I explained it to my dad was I asked him if he’d ever taken an economics class. He said yes. Then I asked him if he knew what marginal utility was. He said yes. Then I asked him what the marginal utility was for me getting a degree versus me spending the next year and a half playing more poker and making more money. He kind of understood that if I was going to be playing poker anyway, that it didn’t really matter if I got a degree.”

Stern’s poker journey began in the back of an engineering class at his New York high school, and after taking a beating in local small-stakes poker games Stern decided to start studying the game –mostly at the 2+2 poker forums—and by the time he was a senior in high school Stern had amassed a $6,000 poker bankroll. 2 years out of high school Ansky was already obliterating the online poker games up to the $25/$50 stakes, and now Ansky plays in some of the highest stakes poker games in the world.

Stern has played a smattering of live tournaments in his career thus far, and despite entering very few events he has fared quite well. Stern’s largest cash came in 2009 in the $40,000 buy-in No Limit Holdem tournament at the 40th Annual WSOP where he finished in 4th place for an impressive payday of $548,315. The following year Stern final tabled the $10,000 Pot Limit Holdem Championship at the WSOP adding another $161,934 to his swelling bankroll.

Ansky’s results have been rewarded with a sponsorship from Doyles Room Poker, where he was handpicked by Doyle Brunson himself to be part of the Brunson 10 –a group of some of the top young poker talent in the game.