Does Daniel Negreanu Still Play Poker

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Daniel negreanu poker blog
  1. Dude still loves and plays his poker as his instagram showed him playing a 500k cash game at Aria 2 days ago. However even Negreanu would admit he is out of his league online. His play is based so.
  2. Play in a poker room with good security and ratings. All of the big poker rooms are well regulated. So as a first choice play on one of the well-known poker sites and stay away from the lesser-known sites unless you have a very good reason. The sites we have covered above have good security and ratings, however, be careful if.

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.

He Passed on Joining PokerStars. Fans know Daniel Negreanu and PokerStars go way back.

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.'

'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.

Play

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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I recently spoke at a conference in Toronto called Discovery that is put on by the responsible gaming council each year. I was asked some tough questions, but none that I wasn’t prepared for. There was one question that inspired me to write this blog and it came from a man who asked, “I deal with teenage problem gamblers and many of them say they want to be professional poker players. What would you say to those kids?”

I think the most important aspect of dealing with kids like this is to have an honest, coaching conversation with them. One that illustrates the complexities involved in making a living gambling. You don’t want to come from, “It’s not possible,” because obviously it is. There are thousands of professional poker players in the world, but I can’t think of a handful of pros that are successful today that are not treating it like a serious job and working hard both playing and studying the game.

So my intention in this coaching conversation is to really illustrate what it takes to make a living doing this. To have them fully understand what it really looks like, but doing so in such a way where it’s they themselves that are realizing it, rather than me preaching to them that they shouldn’t bother trying.

I start by explaining to them that a professional poker player is a small business owner, in the business of entertaining their customers (players who aren’t as skilled as they are). Most every successful business has a mission statement. Since this is a one man small business let’s call it a vision statement.

The vision statement should be one to two sentences on exactly what you want to see for the company. You are the company of course, so I would encourage you to write this vision statement now. It could look something like this:

My vision in poker is to use it as a vehicle to create abundance in my life. To passionately dedicate myself to learning, improving, and developing my skills, while also being financially responsible.

That’s just one example, you need to write one that speaks to you personally because you will be coming back to this statement often. It is the statement that will guide you during your career. The next step is to get a little more specific and quantify what abundance looks like for you. A concrete yearly income you are hoping to achieve. For this example, let’s use $100,000 as the goal.

So now we have the vision statement and the goal, next up is the HOW. The real plan. Drawing from our vision statement, we need to make sure that our plan is financially responsible and that we are continuing to develop our skills away from the table. To hit the $100,000 a year mark, it also requires that you are able to gauge how much money you can expect to make hourly in the game you are playing.

Daniel Negreanu Worth

For example, let’s say your bankroll and skill level have you playing $2-$5 no limit hold’em at Bellagio. It’s important to know how much that game is worth to you. The best place to start would be to ask around and see what the best player in that game can expect to make, then deduct about 30% from that total. Yes, you may become the best player in that game, but until you have proven you can be, lets assume you are still in the learning phase and shouldn’t expect to jump out of the gate and be the best player at the table.

Based on what I’ve heard, the best players in that game may make as much as $30 an hour. Deduct 30% from that, if all goes well you can target $21 an hour. To make the math easier, let’s just make it $20 flat per hour. Since our goal is to make $100,000 a year, now we can have a rough idea of how many hours we actually need to spend at the table playing poker. That comes to 5000 hours a year playing. If we break down that further, that comes to 417 hours a month, which breaks down to over 100 hours a week! This is before we even add all of the study hours required to be in line with our vision statement. For ever 10 hours of play, you should add at least two hours of study time. Add on another 1000 hours a year of study, which boils down to 14 hours a week.

What Is The Net Worth Of Daniel Negreanu

So now we have you playing 105 hours a week, and studying around 14 hours a week for a total close to 120 hours in a week. Do you know how many hours are in a week? 168. If you plan on sleeping 8 hours a night, that’s another 56 hours a week. With work/study at 120 and sleep at 56, that totals 176 hours a week.

Daniel negreanu playing poker

Uh oh, Houston we have a problem! While your vision statement was quite clear as was your goal, your plan just isn’t feasible. It’s just not humanly possible unless you plan on skipping out on sleep entirely and having absolutely no social life whatsoever! No matter how good you play, your plan is destined to fail and it will.

So the most obvious thing to adjust is your expectations on your yearly income. Maybe lowering it from $100,000 down to $50,000 a year. To save time, let’s assume you can make a plan work where you make $50,000 a year working very hard. Will this allow you to create abundance in your life? Maybe, maybe not. That depends on your monthly nut, meaning how much your expenses cost you monthly. We are also going to assume you are a law abiding citizen who pays their income tax, so right off the bat let’s whack of 30% of that $50,000 a year. That leaves you with $35,000 to spend over a 12 month period, or about $2900 a month.

You want a car, you will have rent to pay, and I assume you also may want to eat food at some point. Maybe even have a telephone and wifi in your apartment. So let’s say you find an apartment for $1200 a month, spend another $300 on your car and gas, and then $1000 a month for food. That’s $2500 total, leaving you $400 a month to cover EVERYTHING else! Not to mention the fact that you need to maintain a bankroll big enough to deal with the inevitable swings. Heaven forbid you ever have to fix your car or get a speeding ticket!

If you aren’t playing with a bankroll big enough to play the games you want and live the lifestyle that you want, then what is your plan if you run out of funds? How will you stay in action? Borrowing from friends is one option, but how will you ever build a bankroll big enough to pay them back? At best, you have an extra $400 a month. If you borrowed $5000 it would take two years of everything going perfectly for you to pay them back. How many people do you know that will loan you $5000 on the hope of being paid back in two years if all goes well? So you will get staked you say? Ok, so now someone is putting up the money for you to play in the $2-$5 game and you get to keep 50% of your winnings. Now you will also have to slash your monthly earnings to $1450 a month while your living expenses are at $2500. You are still underwater. Well what if I get staked to play higher limits? OK, so you are going to find a backer to put you in $5-$10 games where you have no experience, there are tougher players, and your win rate isn’t guaranteed to be any higher than the $2-$5? Good luck with that.

Daniel Negreanu Playing Poker

This is all painting a dark picture by design. It is the reality that most of you who are hoping to become professional poker players face. One that can’t be ignored. Is it possible that you have the work ethic, the modest monthly nut, the skill set, the emotional stability, the drive, the will, the bankroll, etc. Sure, but don’t be fooled. There are maybe 2%-5% of people that can make this lifestyle work. Less than 5% of ball players in the minor leagues will ever make the big leagues. Even less high school football players putting on weight in the hopes of an NFL career will make it. There are many careers where the odds are heavily stacked against you. There are heroes, those special people who have “it” and find a way to make it, but most will fail. This holds true in poker as well.

Does Daniel Negreanu Still Play Poker Without

My intention wasn’t to discourage you from chasing your dreams, whatever they may be. My intention was to illustrate to you that it will require HARD WORK. It will not be as easy as it looks on TV. Are you willing to put in all that hard work, all the while knowing that even if you do, it still may not be enough?