He played on board four and scored 7½/10 points, boosting his FIDE rating by 25 points, reaching 2500 (the minimum for the GM title). Hansen is the second youngest Canadian to attain the title of Grandmaster, after Mark Bluvshtein, who reached it at age 16 in 2004, and the youngest homegrown Canadian (since Bluvshtein received Israeli youth chess training systems before immigrating to Canada in 1999 at age 11). FIDE awarded him the title in January 2013. Hansen tied for 1st–5th places at the American Continental Championship 2012, held in October in Mar del Plata, Argentina, with Julio Granda Zuñiga, Alexander Shabalov, Diego Flores and Gregory Kaidanov. Since there were four qualifying places for the 2013 World Cup, Hansen played a rapidplay playoff with the mentioned players finishing fourth. In December, he won the 2nd Panama Open, scoring 8½/9. In early 2013, Hansen tied for first place at the Cappelle-la-Grande Open in France. In July he shared first place in the Canadian Open in Ottawa with Nigel Short, with both scoring unbeaten 7½/9. In the 2015 Canadian Zonal Championship, Hansen shared first place with Leonid Gerzhoy and Tomas Krnan, who was declared the winner on tiebreak. Hansen is a strong blitz and bullet player, both over-the-board and online. He has been spotted playing at Internet Chess Club (ICC), Chess.com, ChessCube, PlayChess.com, and lichess.org. For most of 2011, Hansen was recognized as the highest-rated player on ChessCube.com, with a 3000+ rating. By April 2012, he was recognized as the highest-rated bullet player on Chess.com. He subsequently qualified for and accepted Chess.com's Death-Match 4 against then-IM Conrad Holt, who had the highest-rated blitz rating. The two were living in the same dorm building on the University of Texas at Dallas campus. The two were tied 4-4 after the first 8 rounds of 5 minute + 1 second increment blitz games. In the second round of 3 minute + 1 second increment blitz games, Holt pulled ahead 5.5-3.5, and eventually won 15-11. While Hansen is no longer the highest ranked blitz and bullet player on Chess.com, as of January 2020 he is ranked 11th in bullet and 145th in blitz. Since April 2015, Hansen has been active on lichess under the alias "chessbrahs", where he mostly plays bullet games.