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Daniel Negreanu has come under fire for his Hold ‘em cash game after some disastrous hands on High Stakes Poker and a brief foray online when he first joined PokerStars. Now, with FOX show PokerStars’ Big Game approaching, he decided to improve his NLHE fundamentals... by taking on the best.
Imagine this pleasant scenario – you began playing poker in the late eighties and got pretty handy at the mixed games, making a decent amount of money. Then the poker boom hits and you’re catapulted to stardom with over $12m in tournament earnings, four WSOP bracelets and a lucrative sponsorship deal. You’re set for life in every way imaginable – do you:
a) Retire early, playing golf or watching TV all day and rolling around on your piles of money for the rest of your life, playing poker recreationally?
b) Decide to improve your game and attack the toughest Hold ‘em tables on the face of the earth.
If you answered A, congratulations! You’re a sensible human, but you don’t have a tenth of the drive and determination that Daniel Negreanu, four-time WSOP bracelet-winner and Team PokerStars Pro has.
You all know “Kid Poker” – at 1998, after causing a stir in Canada and at Foxwoods, he became the youngest WSOP bracelet-winner in history. Since then he’s topped the all-time tournament money list (currently behind to just Phil Ivey) with $12,583,277 in live tournament winnings as well as being considered one of the top high-stakes mixed game players in the world. He’s one of the chief representatives of PokerStars.com and is probably worth more money than you could ever dream of.
So why, with the No-Limit Hold ‘em games online being as close to solved as they could ever be, does Kid Poker think it’s a good idea to dive into the $100/$200 games on PokerStars (at a mere $50,000 per buy-in) and attempt to elevate his Hold ‘em game to the point of beating the world’s best players in the world’s hardest game?
“The toughest NL Hold ‘em cash games in the world are online,” says Negreanu. “Compare this to the toughest live games” – usually higher than high stakes and with more variants of poker than can be listed – “which are usually built up around certain players and circulate around them.
“It's 100% a personal challenge, and not really a challenge at all. I play poker, and I've neglected to improve my poker skills over the past 5 years so working on my game was a necessity.”
Negreanu certainly didn’t start off his career by neglecting to improve his poker skills. From the two events at the Foxwood World Poker Finals in 1997 the Canadian pro moved from strength to strength. In 1998 he had won his first WSOP bracelet in Pot-Limit Hold ‘em, by 2005 he was WSOP Player of the Year for the second series in a row after 12 final tables. Oh, he also managed to take down two WPT events in that time and continue playing the highest stakes cash games in the world. Throughout this period he was renowned for his “small ball” style of poker, where he would accumulate chips by stealing lots of small pots by playing his position and implied odds. Now in order to beat the likes of Cole “cts” South, Richard “nutsinho” Lyndaker and Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo, Negreanu is having to adapt his game like never before.
“I've never said that small ball is the best approach to playing against high level, sophisticated opponents,” Negreanu warns would-be users of his patented poker style. “Small ball is best suited for tournaments and also cash games with weaker players.”
Negreanu has made good use of this style over the years, also relying on an uncanny knack for reading his opponents that has gained him notoriety. Just type his name into YouTube and you’ll find dozens of hits; clips of World Series of Poker action where Kid Poker calls out his opponents’ exact hole cards or folds the near-nuts when someone’s huge draw gets there on the river. When you play online, obviously you can’t see if someone looks nervous about that pot-sized bet. Does that faze him?
“It's a huge disadvantage for me,” Negreanu concedes. “I can't understate that really. Not being able to see my opponents cripples me in a lot of ways.”
Sitting not in front of his opponent, chatting them up and idly passing time with good-humoured small talk is where he is at his most formidable. However, can “Kid Poker” still compete when faced with nothing but cold pixels and aggressive bets?
“The first week I learned a ton. Spent lots of time on it, and feel like I improved drastically,” Negreanu says. “I'm always the first to admit that there are Swiss cheese like holes in my NL cash game based on today's players. But, there are fewer holes today than there were a month ago”
His results mirror this. After experiencing some swings he began to adjust, one table at a time. Since then he has dropped down to $5/$10 in order to practise multi-tabling and now he can regularly be found with $200,000 across two tables of $100/$200, squaring off against the best in the Hold ‘em world.
Of course, with this revelation the haters came out of the woodwork – criticising his lack of 8-tabling skills and claiming that ‘the long run’ would take years to reach at his hand rate, claiming that Negreanu was too far behind the NL world to catch up and that he can’t play cash games. He ignores them.
“I truly never let any of that stuff [posted online] hurt my feelings or affect me, but I
also decided a while back that reading those forums is a complete waste of my time,” Negreanu says. “I could use that time to work on my game. I haven't looked at any poker forums in a long time and I don't plan on browsing the forums in the future.”
Of course, the negative comments on the forums come from random Two Plus Two users. Those with an educated opinion believe Negreanu can do it: “I feel like if he's focused and actually puts some effort into it, give him 6 months and he'd be a favourite in the line-ups he gets to play against,” wrote Mike Schneider, with Cole South mirroring acclaim for Kid Poker.
Will he be in for a hard wake-up when ‘the long run’ hits or will Negreanu become a feared NL cash game player? Those are extreme ends of the spectrum, but we’d put significant money on somewhere closer to the latter. |
