Negreanu misses out

Daniel Negreanu has a WSOP record that most players can only dream of.
With 52 cashes, four bracelets and millions in winnings on his resume, it looked like Kid Poker was a shoe in to add to his haul in the $1,500
PLH Event #5. But a disappointing fifth-place for Negreanu wasn’t the only news
from a bad tempered final table.

Negreanu had a series to forget in 2010, cashing just three times, and
it’s almost four long years since his last bracelet win in 2008’s $2,000 LHE. So
when he got it all-in with A-Q against Nick Jivkov’s A-J in Event #5, Kid Poker was ready to take a chunk out of Erik Seidel’s $1m lead atop the all-time money list and move his WSOP wins tally to an impressive six. Sadly for Negreanu, a suck out for Jivkov,
who would go on to win the event, put pay to those ambitions.

‘It’s early in the summer and you just know you’re going to be here for
the whole time and that you’re going to have to take bad beats. That’s just
part of the deal,’ Negreanu told reporters afterwards.

‘That hand was tough and it didn’t go my way but you have to be ready
for it and accept it. Right now all I focus on is how I’m playing and right now
I’m playing really well. Every hand I play, forget every tournament, every hand
I play I’m playing really well.’

But Event #5’s final table won’t go down in history for Negreanu’s
bad luck, nor the stellar eight-place performance of Brit John Eames. Instead, the
controversy surrounding Jonathan Aguiar and the WSOP’s twitter feed will be
remembered as one of the biggest stories of 2012.

Aguiar took umbrage with a new WSOP rule, which stipulates that
players on all live-streamed feature and final tables must verbally declare all
of their actions, for the benefit of those watching at home and online.

Aguiar, who eventually finished third, claims that during three-handed
play, players questioned the rule. Instead of their voices being listened to, floorman
said they would postpone the event for the evening if the players didn’t
comply.

The drama wasn’t finished there, though, and Aguiar took to Twitter the
next day to bad mouth the WSOP and its actions.

‘The WSOP final table rule required playing[sic] to announce every
single action and bet is possibly the worst rule in poker history,’ he tweeted.
But in a stunning response, whoever’s responsible for the WSOP’s Twitter
account then chose to retweet a harsh message from a third-party labelling Aguiar
a ‘complete bitch’ who ‘cries all day’.

The fallout keeps going, with blogs, players and forums debating who
was in the wrong and whether or not @WSOP were right to retweet the comment.
What do you think? Let us know @pokerplayer.co.uk

Here’s how Event #5 finished up:

1. Nick Jivkov  $189,818
2. Bryan Pellegrino  $117,199
3. Jonathan Aguiar  $76,189
4. Tommy Vedes  $55,960
5. Daniel Negreanu  $41,683
6. Mike Allis  $31,452
7. Brant Hale  $24,007
8. John Eames  $18,529
9. Keanu Tabali  $14,449