Going broke, playing drunk, being the sucker – Michael Kaplan talks to Daniel Negreanu, the nicest guy in poker, about the path to superstardom
It’s 5pm on a Monday afternoon in Las Vegas, and poker superstar Daniel Negreanu is nowhere near the action. He’s at home, lying on his camel-coloured sofa, the edge of a blanket pulled up to his chin. A pet chihuahua curls up at his side. The flat-screen TV above his fireplace emits a frozen moment from an innocuous commercial. Under the covers, 32-year-old Negreanu wears jogging pants, a t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the logo of his website – FullContactPoker.com – which recently added its own online poker room.
Just a couple of days ago, he was in Canada, participating in a charity event and doing press for his site as well as his upcoming computer game, Stacked. Loaded with artificial intelligence, it will enable players to hone their chops against a machine programmed to improve right along with them. In coming months, the winner of a Full Contact Poker tournament will become Negreanu’s official protégé (the title includes buy-ins into four $10,000 tournaments and guidance from Negreanu). Later this evening he’s slated to do a radio interview and, at this exact moment, sitting across from him is your faithful correspondent from PokerPlayer, about to pepper the pro with questions. Negreanu looks jet-lagged but he’s making the best of it. ‘Right now,’ he admits, ‘the lifestyle of poker is hardly glamorous. It’s exhausting.’
Early exit
Indeed, the past month has been a whirlwind of travel (Miami, Bahamas, Los Angeles, Australia, and Tunica) for televised tournaments that define the modern poker circuit. And things didn’t seem to be going so great for the famously aggressive gambler: in the sunny Bahamas he got knocked out of the tournament on day one and went on to spend two days, holed up in his room, watching DVDs of the American TV show 24. Australia proved to be a bust and so was a preliminary tournament in Tunica. Newlywed Negreanu was so bummed that he flew home during a two-day break between events, just so he could hang with his pretty wife Lori and try to recharge within the confines of his newly domesticated home.
It must have worked. When he returned to Tunica, for a World Series circuit event, Negreanu survived the early rounds by grinding it out and getting lucky a couple times. Then, on the second day of competition, his poker mojo began to kick in.
‘Day two is normally my big day; historically, it’s when I make my big moves,’ he says, sitting up, setting down his dog, flicking off the TV. ‘I think it’s because on day one you deal with less stack fluctuation. One thing I’m pretty good at is taking advantage of the guys who are playing short. Also, I find that people are willing to call J-10 suited for $300. But for $3,000, they think it’s too much – even though it represents the same percentage of their chip stacks. So I like to take advantage of that.’
After more than just surviving the second day, he went on to win the tournament and its first prize of $755,000. ‘It’s either get knocked out the first day or go all the way,’ he says with a laugh. Then he understates, ‘Anyway, making 750 for a month of tournaments isn’t bad.’
The nonchalance has been hard-earned. Over the last six years Daniel Negreanu has won more than $7m in tournaments, countless millions in cash games, and emerged as one of the savvier players on the scene. In the brave new world of poker, where marketing can be as important as table aggression, Negreanu seems to be what Chip Reese likes to call ‘the complete package’. He’s now commanding $30k for speaking engagements, attaching his name to promising ancillary opportunities (the poker site and computer game), fending off groupies (‘Girls are the new thing,’ he says. ‘It’s new that women in clubs look at me with awe’), and remaining a frequent presence at the final tables – which, to Negreanu’s way of thinking, is the most important thing of all. ‘I never want to be a fake poker player,’ he says, meaning the kind of pro who’s famous for playing but hardly ever does it anymore. ‘The game always has to come first.’
Doing his homework
To that end, Negreanu has recently been devoting loads of time to learning about his competitors who get most of their experience online. While many veteran pros – as much as anyone else, Negreanu provides a bridge between the worlds of old-school Doyle Brunson and upcoming star Eric Sagstrom – dismiss Internet players for being too fast and loose, Negreanu acknowledges the importance of studying how the other half plays.
‘Pros who were big in the 1980s and 1990s make a mistake by believing that they have it all figured out. The game evolves and gets tougher, and I believe that if I don’t learn what all these 21-year-old kids are learning the game will pass me by. They play more aggressively than any group has ever played before. It used to be that if you didn’t know who was at your table, you were at a good table. Now you find yourself sitting next to a guy who seems like a random Swede and he turns out to be Daniel Bergsdorf – a multi-million dollar winner on the Net.’ Negreanu can’t help but laugh as he adds, ‘Now you get put alongside Tom McEvoy or Brad Dougherty, who’ve won plenty of tournaments in the past, and figure that you’re at a good table.’
In order to avoid turning into an old pro whom opponents are glad to see, Negreanu’s been learning new tricks. ‘The best online players are good at getting vibes of tempo and using that to figure out how people think,’ he continues. ‘They know all the mathematically optimal plays and are very skilled at getting into their opponents’ heads.’
Negreanu, in his own way, is no slouch at this either. A coffeehouser supreme, he routinely chats up other players, acts super friendly, and sponges whatever details he can squeeze out. ‘The information is out there; you just have to ask for it,’ he says. ‘If I don’t know a guy at my table, I get into a conversation with him, and, after five minutes, I’ll know so much: what he does for a living, where he plays, if he’s had any previous success. This is a byproduct of me being myself, but it’s also calculated. I want to know how serious he is, how experienced he is, whether or not he’s doing this for recreation or to make money.’ Negreanu hesitates, then dryly adds, ‘And if a guy tells me he’s a lawyer, right off the bat I know not to trust him.’
But it can also be far more subtle than that. During a highstakes tournament at the Plaza Hotel in downtown Vegas, Negreanu pulled off a brilliant play by successfully putting Freddy Deeb on a hand – and making sure Deeb knew about the read. Then, later in the tournament, Negreanu sensed weakness from the Lebanese pro (who held top pair but was up against a dangerous board) and called with nothing. On the river (which created full house, straight and flush possibilities), Negreanu made a $100,000 raise (sizeable, yet small enough to look like he was trying to trap his opponent) and scared Deeb out of the action. From the commentator’s booth, Howard Lederer called Negreanu’s move, ‘one of the great bluffs of all time.’
More recently, on the American TV show High Stakes Poker (in which pros and a couple of wealthy amateurs – thus, the lure for the pros – buy in for $100,000 or more and play no-limit for cash), Negreanu tried to put a psychological whammy on Barry Greenstein. ‘Barry has a play in which if two people just call, he makes a big raise,’ explains Negreanu. ‘I didn’t want him to make that play because it clashes with my style. I like to see flops, and he’s trying to take dead money. So I made sure he realised that I knew about this play’ – and simultaneously made sure that everyone else at the table knew about it as well. ‘He did it, and I said on camera, “That, right there, is a Barry play. A couple of people limp in and he likes to raise it. He’s probably got K-8 right now.” He had J-10 off-suit, but it showed him that I know about his game. And it forces him to adjust.’
Did the ploy work? ‘Hard to say,’ admits Negreanu. ‘When you plant these seeds in people’s minds, they don’t cultivate overnight, but it’s something that can help me down the road. Barry knows I said it, and I’ll remember it forever.’
Million dollar baby
That Negreanu was in a position to buy into High Stakes Poker for more money than other players in a scary line-up – Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan and Sammy Farha, all started out with $100,000 to $200,000; Negreanu opened the proceedings with a cool million because he ‘wanted to control the table in more ways than one’ – is testament to how far this diminutive natural born gambler has gone in the world of poker. On the other hand, though, there’s a good argument to be made that Negreanu always seemed destined for the place he now inhabits. His introduction to gambling came at the age of 14, when he and his friends would head into Toronto, Canada, from their nearby suburban town, to shoot stick in the city’s pool halls (a game that Negreanu stumbled across by playing Super Mario Brothers in the adjacent video arcade).
Like many poker players before him – Puggy Pearson, Amarillo Slim and John Hennigan spring immediately to mind – Negreanu quickly made the leap from betting on billiards to playing cards in the backroom. ‘They played games like Fiery Cross and Follow the Bitch and Kings-and- Little-Ones,’ he remembers. ‘I was around 15 by then, so I was already drinking. I remember losing my 10 bucks and chilling out on the couch with a beer. But we played more and more. By the time I was 17 I was playing in high school during the day and hosting night-games at my house with some of the older kids.’
Kingpin of his high school’s poker scene, Negreanu generated action in the cafeteria, distributed parlay tickets, and suddenly found himself raking in $100 a day. ‘I got into watching the winning players,’ says Negreanu, adding that he worked hard to learn and emulate but still had trouble beating the older kids who played in his house. ‘The one day this new guy came to town and kicked up the stakes. He bet and raised and was superaggressive. He wound up winning $9,000 in one night. I decided to try adding some of his style to the tight-but-aggressive approach I had already adapted. Then, all of a sudden, I was winning at home as well as at school.’
The school game, though, was not to last. After a kid got caught stealing a cheque from his parents, with which to pay off Negreanu, the future Kid Poker was suspended. He set off on a rocky path that had him bouncing between sporadic stretches of school, flunky jobs (telemarketing for a day, managing a salad bar for a longer stretch, working at a Subway sandwich shop), and late nights in Toronto’s underground poker clubs where Negreanu risked his entire bankroll (often as little as $500) by buying into awkward $10-$25 games. He was badly funded, in and out of action, in and out of debt, but always learning. ‘Then,’ he remembers, ‘I started playing in 11-handed games where I was the only one who ever folded before the flop. People laughed at me for folding without knowing what cards would be coming next. Now that’s a real good game. I played for 30 days and won $1,000 every day.’
Next stop for Negreanu was Las Vegas – a place that has a way of reminding young poker turks that they themselves are not exactly the stone cold nuts. The trips were generally losing propositions that resulted in him heading home broke and humbled, mumbling vague responses when poker pals asked how things went in Vegas. But every trip was an education – particularly a session he spent playing with the late druggedout Stu Ungar, during which Negreanu learned the importance of being the alpha male at the table – and he sensed his game improving.
However, it was one singularly bad experience that provided him with the greatest lesson of his burgeoning career. He had just busted out of a $20-$40 game at the Horseshoe, which was nothing unusual for Negreanu. Back then, he busted out of Vegas games all the time. Out of action, he stepped back from the table, went off to the lavatory and came back to the poker room to check on how things were proceeding. ‘It was just two minutes later and the entire table was empty, nobody was around, the game was done,’ he says, acknowledging that it took him two seconds to recognise that he was the game’s raison d’être. ‘It was embarrassing to know that these people looked at me like I was a sucker. I looked at other people like suckers; not the other way around.’
Building an image
Once he got over the sting, though, Negreanu, ever the apt poker pupil, dissected his experience and decided to learn from it. He realised that the most important thing he needed to work on was his table image. ‘In Toronto people thought I was crazy aggressive and couldn’t defend against it,’ he remembers, adding that he had a habit of keeping notes at the table, gaining an understanding of the moves and situations that led to winning and losing results. ‘But in Vegas I was this bull who three-raised and got raised right back. I was being outplayed.’ He reined it in a little bit, accepted that he didn’t always have to raise with Q-5 in late position, and, once the controls were implemented, he garnered respect from his opponents. ‘I started to win as soon as I stopped looking like the crazy bluffing kid with just one gear.’
In 1998 Negreanu won his first World Series bracelet, playing pot-limit Hold’em and sharing his action with new friend Todd Brunson. After taxes, he had $90,000 and the respect of his up-and-coming contemporaries. A year later he was living in Vegas and chomping his way along the poker food-chain, quickly establishing himself as one of the scene’s hot, new players. He found himself in the midst of young, fast company. Burgeoning stars John Juanda, Lane Flack, Alan Cunningham and Phil Ivey were all making their bones in the Bellagio poker room. And so was Negreanu.
But even as his star was rising, Negreanu found himself slightly star-crossed. He was gambling for high stakes and living a pretty fat life. Increasingly, he’d meet friends for premium-priced steak or sushi dinners in the Bellagio. There’d be lots of wine for the meal and shots of Bailey’s Irish Cream with dessert. Then Negreanu would switch to beer and hit the poker felt, playing in the kinds of games where being inebriated can be costly. ‘Sometimes I’d play all night and lose $20,000 or $30,000,’ he confesses. ‘But I didn’t care because I had a lot of money [from the nights when he played straight and focused]. I screwed around and played lots of golf and took things nonchalantly.’ But then his fortunes spiraled downhill: ‘I had no quality hours of poker, few tournament wins, and no winning in the side games because I wasn’t really there.’
Eventually Negreanu went broke, borrowed money from Ted Forrest and played his way out of the hole. But his problems were not gone. He describes 2000 as ‘a blur,’ enjoying his weekly party nights (in which he’d get drunk and play high stakes poker, viewing the combination as an efficient way of blowing off steam), and living as if he willfully wanted to burn through his bankroll. The worst night of all was his 26th birthday in 2000. ‘We were out drinking and, of course, we ended up in the poker room,’ he recounts. ‘I had an $80,000 or $90,000 bankroll, everyone was drinking lemondrop shots and kamikazes – or at least I thought they were – and I played really bad. In one hand there were trips on board and all the other guy needed to beat me was a Nine. I bet and re-raised six times. Mike Matusow and Jennifer Harmon both tried getting me to go home. But I was feeling too self-destructive to leave.’
Broken man
The next morning, when Negreanu woke up, a hangover was the least of his worries. ‘I wasn’t sure if I had any money left in my [safety deposit] box,’ he continues, explaining that he went down to the Bellagio (where he kept his gambling money) with a sense of dread. ‘I opened the box slowly and was relieved to see something in there. It turned out, though, that I had lost $70,000.’ As bad as the financial beating was the emotional one. ‘I was embarrassed. I felt awkward around other people. I realised they saw me as a shell of myself.’
Once again Negreanu dug deep and found the heart to play like a pro. This time, though, there was no turning back. In 2001, he began shredding the tournaments, winning more than $300,000 (as opposed to $10,000 in tourney winnings the year before). By 2002, he was flush and flying high, beating the $300-$600 cash games, eventually moving up to $1,000-$2,000, still kicking butt in the tournaments and working hard to keep it all together – yet still struggling with the partying demons. In fact, despite a couple of seasons of impressive poker playing, it wasn’t until 2003 that Negreanu had what he describes as his ‘pivotal year’. It’s the year when he met his wife, Lori, on a poker cruise. She was working as a nanny for a non-pro player (who had qualified online), and Negreanu was ready to make changes in his life.
‘What I lacked, and what a lot of guys lack – guys like John Hennigan and Ted Forrest – is a foundation or any reason to win,’ Negreanu explains. ‘When you’re a poker player and you lose half-a million, it’s really no big deal’ – there’s always more money. But when you’re playing for someone else in your life, you don’t want to embarrass yourself.
Serious side
Once he and Lori began seeing one another, Negreanu knew that he had to take things more seriously: ‘She wouldn’t want to be with a deadbeat. And I wanted to live a cleaner, more stable life. Some people get driven in that direction because of a woman; for other people it’s because of God; and for some it’s a spiritual experience. It’s a combination for me. Lori is from a conservative home. She talked to me about God. It struck a chord with me. It’s made a difference in how I view what’s important in my life.’
He’s become serious about Christianity and insists that his new-found beliefs have transformed him into a better poker player. It’s hard to argue with the results, which justify his claim. In 2004, soon after he began to believe, Negreanu cleared more than $4m in tournament winnings and snagged Player of the Year honours plus the Toyota Tundra SUV that came with the title. ‘Religion has helped me be more focused, but it’s also helped me realise a simple key factor: If I’m up in my room the night before a tournament, not drinking and not going out, I do better. I need the time alone in my room, eating room-service food for dinner, unplugging and getting focused. Beyond that, I’ve decided that I will not play any tournaments if I don’t really want to be there.’
No doubt, religion has also contributed to Negreanu keeping a handle on his ego, even as Hold’em seems to be bigger than Hollywood. ‘So many poker players have lost touch with reality to the point that they are in another world,’ he muses as the phone rings with wife Lori wanting to know what her husband wants from California Kitchen. ‘I remember sitting in a green room with Phil Hellmuth, Phil Gordon and Mike Matusow. There was a two-hour argument over which Phil is more famous. Phil Gordon insisted that he’s got a higher Q-rating.’ But that was nothing compared to what went down when Negreanu, Hellmuth and Scotty Nguyen teamed up to shoot a Diet Pepsi commercial. ‘I turned out to be the lead character and Phil threw a hissy fit. He threatened to leave the set because he was not the main character in the commercial. He said, “I don’t play second fiddle to anyone. Make sure I get paid more than Daniel.”’
Negreanu shakes his head and smiles, clearly getting a kick out of it all, but reiterating that the game is the thing, that TV commercials and Internet-related publicity stunts are mere icing on the cake. In fact, Negreanu seems most animated when he recounts playing for cash in San Diego during one of the recent World Series circuit events. This particular game raged for three nights, with skyscraping stakes of $4,000-$8,000. ‘It was a glimpse into the future’ – because the poker-fest turned into a three-way showdown between new superstars Negreanu, Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen – ‘and also my first time being down more than $1m. I fell behind $1.3m and Phil said, “He’s just reached beantown.” I was going to quit if I got stuck $1.5m. But then I hit a nice rush and Gus got buried. I won $545,000 all told. It was so much fun. We were at war, playing allout poker, with nobody wanting to be thought of as the sucker. It had a home game feel to it – even though the stakes were huge. I was on my 18th wind, everything was funny, and the only part of my brain that worked was the poker part. I couldn’t have told you my birthday, but I remembered the last five hands that had been played.’
Negreanu appears momentarily lost in the pleasant haze of the memory, when his wife Lori walks through the front door. She sets down the shopping, pets the dog, pecks Daniel and heads to the fridge. The couple chat about domestic stuff and the vibe in the room shifts, transforming Negreanu from a high stakes chip Hoover to an ordinary husband about to enjoy a take-away meal with his beloved.
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