[Malachii]

If you're referring to Poker Superstars, yes, he did pot a number of beats on people, but the only one where he was a significant underdog (I believe) was the one against Barry Greenstein where Barry had him dominated. The rest he was just slightly the underdog.

Some observations:

- Despite being a slight underdog, it was probably +EV for him to gamble because of the pot odds he was getting. That is, calling as a slight underdog probably had a better EV than folding.

- Gus was playing against the absolute best players in the world, players who have gotten the best of him in cash games. Obviously he would want to counter this by maximizing his volatility and making them gamble whenever possible.

- Gus's aggressiveness leads to a number of blind steals (which we don't see, because we're on TV.) In short, he's stealing so many antes that he can afford to occasionally take the worst of it. All we see are the trash hands that he gets called on and gets a big flop, we never see the trash hands that don't get called.

- Gus's aggressiveness gets people to overplay their hands against him. Howard Lederer pushed all in with an A9o after Gus opened a pot, Gus called with AQ and busted him. Doyle made a massive checkraise with pocket queens (a huge overbet of the pot) and got called by Gus's pocket aces. Doyle even said later he wouldn't have done that against anyone but Gus.

I think if you work out the math, Gus was never worse than a 2-1 underdog, and in spots where he was "taking the worst of it" he was frequently something like a 45-55% underdog, but he knew the math and called anyway in a spot where most would have folded. He's just unconventional, and people don't like that for whatever reason.