Negreanu Daniel
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First, Daniel Negreanu wanted to play Phil Hellmuth heads-up. Now, he’s making a high-stakes bet that he can’t compete against the world’s best poker players in high-stakes tournaments.
Negreanu tweeted Tuesday afternoon that he bet against the 15-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner being profitable in the $25,000 buy-in tournaments that have recently started running again at the Aria in Las Vegas. Negreanu will be laying 2:1 against Hellmuth profiting over a 50-tournament sample size.
Negreanu will be laying $400,000 against Hellmuth’s $200,000. If Hellmuth finishes in the black over the course of that sample size, Negreanu will lose the bet and fork over the six-figure sum.
Bet offered and accepted:
I’m laying $400k to phil_hellmuth</a> $200k that over 50 $25k buy in <a href='https://twitter.com/AriaLV?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw'>AriaLV tournaments that Hellmuth will end up in the red.
If he shows a $1 profit he wins the bet.
— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) March 2, 2021
The bet looks like an extension of a recently ignited feud between the two poker legends. Following Negreanu’s seven-figure loss to Doug Polk in their high-stakes heads-up grudge match, Hellmuth publicly criticized the six-time bracelet winner’s play in the challenge.
- Daniel Negreanu is the greatest young poker player in the world. He is a two-time World Poker Tour champion, winner of four bracelets at the World Series of Poker, and a contributor to Super System 2. Since 1997, he has won more major tournament than any other player in the world.
- Daniel Negreanu is a Canadian professional poker player who is widely regarded as one of the best poker players of all time. As of January 2021, he had won 6 World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets (1998, 2003, 2004, 2008, and twice in 2013) and 2 World Poker Tour (WPT) championship titles (2004 Borgata Poker Open, 2004 Five Diamond World Poker Classic).
Doug Polk finished his heads-up “Grudge Match” vs. Daniel Negreanu in style, winning $250,000 in a roller-coaster six-hour session on Wednesday. The huge win put him at +$1.2 million over.
Hellmuth’s words sparked a fiery response from Negreanu, who offered to play heads-up at any stakes in any venue for any duration. The challenge seemed to imply a cash game challenge, which Negreanu had just spent months studying, but the two agreed to play in a heads-up sit-n-go format on PokerGO’s “High Stakes Duel.”
It will be Hellmuth’s second battle on the show after beating Antonio Esfandiari three straight matches for $400,000 in his first go-around.
Not only is Negreanu calling his heads-up game into question but is now openly doubting how good Hellmuth is at multi-table tournaments, a format that has netted him the career WSOP bracelet record, as well as more than $22 million in earnings.
Other high roller regulars are agreeing with Negreanu. Ali Imsirovic, a 24-year-old pro who made a meteoric rise up the ranks while netting more than $9 million in career tournament earnings, offered to wager even more if Hellmuth was willing to take more action.
If hellmuth wants more action, I’ll bet as much as he wants. pic.twitter.com/nBZMXR1QSt
— Ali (@aliImsirovic) March 3, 2021
Four-time WSOP bracelet winner and 2009 WSOP main event winner Joe Cada was willing to bet that the challenge doesn’t even get completed.
Can I bet this challenge doesn’t get completed? Has Phil even played over 50 25k’s in his lifetime?
— Joseph Cada (@JoeCada99) March 3, 2021
A few others implied that the regulars are already licking their chops at the thought of Hellmuth being a regular spot in the field.
25k regs rn pic.twitter.com/kMIXDjIGep
— Max Silver (@max_silver) March 3, 2021
Germans right now pic.twitter.com/XTQh6nAt80
— Alex Huang (@alexjhuang) March 3, 2021
Aria’s Director of Poker Operations Sean McCormack said in the thread that Aria has “a few a month on average,” when someone asked how many $25,000 buy-ins run regularly. It will likely take Hellmuth most of the year to complete the challenge at that pace, but the frequency that the property runs those tournaments will increase if there is a major live tournament series this summer or fall.
When it comes to high-stakes tournaments, Hellmuth has always been somewhat of a polarizing figure.
During his heads-up match with Esfandiari, high-stakes legend Phil Galfond gave Hellmuth props, saying that it took him a long time to realize “just how talented he is.” The tweet was met with backlash from many high-stakes pros claiming that Hellmuth was overrated.
Daniel Negreanu Twitter
Table Of Contents
Twenty-five thousand hands are in the books, and Doug Polk might still be counting all the money he won against Daniel Negreanu. After all, takes a long time to get to $1.2 million, to say nothing of the dough he won in crossbooks and side bets.
But while Polk was a clear winner in the match, there may been a less clear winner: Negreanu himself.
How could a guy who just lost seven figures, to his rival nonetheless, be a winner? Well, it requires zooming out a bit. But first, it's instructive to look back at the early portion of the match.
Lacking Aggression
Early in the match, things looked grim for Negreanu. Perhaps not so much in terms of results — after all, he got off to a pretty hot start — but in terms of the strategies he was using simply not being up to snuff in many spots.
Negreanu was missing value with some big hands by not using some big enough bet sizes. He was missing bluffs, checking some hands that didn't have any showdown value in spots where Polk didn't necessarily have a huge hand. He wasn't using the overbets that Polk was so effectively leveraging to put pressure on the opposing player.
It was something both players touched on in post-match interviews.
'He just wasn't bluffing enough.'
Daniel Negreanu Net Worth
'I had two bet sizes,' Negreanu admitted in an appearance on the PokerNews Podcast. 'That's it — either 20% of pot or 75% of pot. That's limiting. It's not good.'
Polk, for his part, said in his post-match breakdown of Negreanu's game that he was 'too conservative with being willing to put in all of the money.'
'He just wasn't bluffing enough,' he said. 'He wasn't being aggressive enough across the board.'
Soaking it in
However, Negreanu didn't become a six-time bracelet winner, the one-time tournament money leader, and a mainstay in poker across multiple decades by accident.
He's a sharp player who has made leaps in the past by, as he said in his PokerNews Podcast appearance, acknowledging what he doesn't know. He's not too proud to look at what stronger players are doing and learn from it.
Of course, what the modern stars are doing to improve their games is often based on solver outputs. Solvers are notorious for finding bluffs that most human players miss, for one thing. And they make use of overbets that Polk often used to hammer away at Negreanu.
Maybe Negreanu never ran his own sims with a solver. After all, he told PokerNews'Sarah Herring that he owns one but doesn't know how to use it. But perhaps his coaches used them to help show him concepts, or perhaps he simply observed Polk's moves and incorporated some of that strategy into his own.
'I soak in this stuff really quickly,' he said.
He'd cleaned up a lot of his leaks by the end. He played far more aggressively and put Polk in some tougher spots. If he wasn't exactly ready to tackle the best in the world, he at least put forth a damn good impression of a high-stakes heads-up regular.
Polk also acknowledged his opponent had 'come a long way' and allowed that a second match between the two would likely be far closer. He opined that Negreanu would easily defeat anyone who wasn't playing high-stakes poker for a living.
A Worthwhile Journey
Ultimately, 25,000 hands against an elite heads-up opponent should shape someone's game for the better, and that's exactly what happened. Call it a $1.2 million, months-long poker lesson, but between the beating he endured and the studying he did to get in fighting shape, Negreanu's game may at this point be the sharpest it's ever been.
'In one retrospect, the journey was worth it because I definitely got a lot better at heads up and poker in general,' he said.
Considering his massive success over the years, that's a prospect that should worry his future opponents.
But, what sorts of opponents will those players be?
Obviously, the skills he learned are going to be most applicable in future heads-up matches. But that's generally a format that figures to be few and far between in terms of Negreanu's play. He's most known for his tournament skills, meaning he'll spend the vast majority of his time at tables with several other players and at stack depths much lower than those he had against Polk.
'The journey was worth it because I definitely got a lot better at heads up and poker in general.'
Luckily for Negreanu, he gets at least one ready-made foe for which his new skills will port right over as he's scheduled to play fellow legend Phil Hellmuth heads up on Season 2 of 'High-Stakes Duel' on PokerGO.
Even beyond that, though, the fact of the matter is most pots wind up heads up by the river, and Negreanu will be well-armed when it comes to these spots, playing a stronger strategy than he's ever brought to bear.
But before he tackles the high-roller regs with whom he's butted heads so many times, he said he's looking get back to a different strategy game. One with less ROI but that he's been enjoying immensely of late: chess.
Daniel Negreanu Age
Negreanu has already played in one tournament, and he's got another coming up pitting him against other big names in the poker world.
'When the Doug match was over, that's a chapter that was closed,' he said. 'I'm devoting, similarly, the same sort of devotion to this chess tournament. It's a lot of fun to step out of your element into a different world.'
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