Negreanu Daniel
When Daniel Negreanuaccepted a challenge to play two tables of $200-$400 heads-up no-limit hold’em against Doug Polk for 25,000 hands, Polk trolled Negreanu by referring to himself as a truck driver and that he was coming into the match with the intention of backing up the truck and driving away with all the money.
Eventually, Polk ditched the truck driver schtick, but he did end up winning a ton of money as the duo completed the challenge Wednesday evening with a marathon session. Over 1,712 hands and more than six hours of heads-up poker, Polk won $255,722 and netted a win of more than $1.2 million for the entire challenge.
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). Daniel Negreanu is a Canadian poker player who has lifetime earnings of more than $42 million in live tournaments. He is the only player to twice win Player of the Year at.
“Congratulations to Doug,” said Negreanu after the match in a post-game interview on the GGPoker YouTube channel. “He’s a great player and obviously the favorite going in. It was a fun challenge. I felt like there were ebbs and flows, of course, in terms of how I felt about it. He’s happy, obviously. He’s the big winner on the match, deservedly so. He played well.”
- 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 was born to Annie and Constantin on July 26th, 1974 in Toronto, Ontario Canada. Daniel’s parents moved to Canada after leaving Romania in hopes of giving their children better lives. At the age of sixteen, Daniel discovered an affinity for gambling, pool hustling, and poker. These games, combined with his love for numbers.
- Information on danielnegreanu.com is intended for poker news and poker entertainment purposes only. Daniel Negreanu encourages you to play poker responsibly. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, please visit NCPG or call 1-800-522-4700 (US Toll Free) for assistance.
Following some shenanigans last week where Polk using a strategy that involved limping a ton of hands on the button, which Negreanu countered by excessively tanking, there were only 3,694 hands remaining in the challenge. On Wednesday afternoon, Negreanu said that the challenge was “likely to finish Friday unless we are feeling spicy and looking to gamboooool!”
The spice was clearly there and the pair decided to play long enough to end it. Polk came into the final two sessions with a nearly insurmountable lead of $736,804 and extended it by winning $209,281 on Monday.
Negreanu opened up a six-figure lead in Wednesday’s final session, but ultimately the tides turned and Polk won the four buy-ins back from the six-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner to get unstuck on the day and proceeded to win more than six buy-ins after that. Polk was on the right end of several coolers including a preflop all in with both players holding A-K. But a runout that contained for spades gave Polk the nut flush and a huge pot.
“The key about massive hands, right?” said Negreanu. “Step 1 is get one. And step 2 is have your opponent have something so strong that you’re going to get all the money.”
It takes some good fortune to go on a 10 buy-in upswing over the course of a six-hour session, but Polk said he was proud of the work that he put into getting back into the swing of heads-up no-limit hold ’em, a game he was once considered the best in the world at.
“I’m very happy that I spent so much time preparing and it really ended up helping me tremendously,” said Polk in a post-game interview of his with Nick Schulman and Jaime Kerstetter on his own YouTube channel. “And that I got to execute at such a high level over such a long period of time.”
Polk went on to thank a slew of people that he had in his corner throughout the whole match.
The three-time WSOP bracelet winner said that he was working with a few people from a general coaching perspective that helped him lock down his approach to the game, another handful of poker players that helped him implement preflop ranges to coincide with Negreanu’s different raise sizes, as well as a large group of members from his own training site, Upswing Poker, that tracked the action of every hand played, which was then inputted into multiple spreadsheets.
And from Negreanu’s point of view, the team kept Polk ahead of the curve.
“Every Monday he came back prepared,” said Negreanu. “He seemed to make some adjustments because there were always holes that we were looking to exploit. There were definitely some. Then when he would sort of get hammered in that spot, he’d go into the lab, come out of the weekend and okay, that hole is no longer valid.”
The match was inspired thanks to the rocky personal history that they have with one another with some intense needling back-and-forth on social media. By the end of the match, however, the two seemingly developed a mutual respect for one another, even swapping hand histories the night before the final battle.
Tuesday study session for the finale working with @DougPolkVids going over all the hands we played and sharing war stories.
Weird.
— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) February 2, 2021
Polk came into the match as the betting favorite. By the end of the match, however, he was impressed by the strides Negreanu had made to his game.
“He did a really impressive job with a lot of the stuff he did,” said Polk. “I did not think he would play this well at all… By the end, he was doing so many sharp things.”
In Polk’s opinion, Negreanu had become so proficient at the game that there weren’t many poker players that could beat him at the format. An impressive feat seeing that Negreanu had very little experience playing heads-up no-limit cash games before taking on Polk.
“If you’re not a heads-up pro, he’s going to beat you,” said Polk about Negreanu. “He’s going to beat you. You’re not going to know as much as him. He will have better sizes, better ranges, better strategies. He just will understand the game better. Outside of the class of high-stakes heads-up pros, Negreanu is going to be one of the best players in the world.”
Outside of the seven figures, Polk also won a sizable amount in side action that was on the match. It was rumored that Bill Perkins had one of the largest bets against Polk and based on a Wednesday night tweet, it appears that he definitely lost some cash, albeit an unknown amount.
Read your friking messages or I'm paying VanessaSelbst instead of you!!!!
— Bill Perkins (Guy) (@bp22) February 4, 2021
Table Of Contents
The grudge has been put to rest, both on the felt and off the felt it seems, between Doug Polk and Daniel Negreanu.
On the felt, the result was firm and resounding: Polk proved the superior performer in their $200/$400 heads-up match. Across 25,000 hands that spanned 36 sessions and three months, Polk beat his rival out of $1,201,807.
That left him with an impressive win rate of 12 BB/100, the envy of nearly any professional at any stakes, much less some of the highest in the world.
Off the felt, the two 'buried the hatchet' in Polk's own words, linking up for a study session before finishing out the match. Negreanu said they shared war stories and Polk called him a worthy opponent, so it seems the rancor between the two top players has been put to bed after years of feuding.
Polk Finishes With a Flourish
After some initial stumbles that saw Negreanu trade off the lead a few times, Polk took command of the match around the 5,000-hand mark and pretty much never looked back.
Negreanu looked for a second like he might battle back as he twice reduced $1 million in losses to a number about half that.
However, it simply wouldn't sustain. Each time, Polk pulled back ahead, even after Negreanu booked a monster win of nearly $400,000 in a single session.
By the time the marathon final sessions went down, with Negreanu pushing hard and looking to play deep-stacked poker as a final Hail Mary, no real drama remained. Polk had secured victory, the only real question being where his final windfall would land.
Back-to-back wins north of $200K would see him finish in emphatic fashion. The final tally of $1.2 million represented his peak win after any session of the entire match, so Polk couldn't have asked for a better closing stretch.
In fact, a relaxed Polk, no longer on his guard about protecting his trade secrets, streamed the final session with cards up.
Negreanu Daniel
Where to From Here?
It's hard to say the final result was anything other than the expected outcome. One could debate whether the total win was above or below expectation, but the betting market had installed Polk as roughly a 4-to-1 favorite in advance of the match, no surprise given his vast experience edge in the heads-up format.
As for each player's next step, PokerNews may take a more thorough look in the coming days and weeks, but Polk made his wishes clear: he wants to return to semi-retirement and a rematch is out of the question.
Whether this particular retirement has more staying power remains to be seen.
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Negreanu, as an active GGPoker, likely has no such desire. Having acquired considerable heads-up skills in his recent endeavors, though, there's been talk of more showcase matches, with Phil Galfondfloated as a possible opponent while he awaits his next pot-limit Omaha challengers.
Negranu Daniel
In any case, the book seems closed on perhaps the most high-profile feud in the game. Teeth and sausage are presumably intact but the price has been paid: Doug Polk is more than $1.2 million richer.
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