Interview with Daniel Negreanu
Original article found at: http://www.pokerpages.com/articles/archives/west29.htm
http://www.pokerpages.com/articles/archives/west30.htm
By Justin West
Daniel Negreanu is without a doubt one of the most popular players the game of poker has ever seen, and for good reason. Daniel currently sits at third on the list of poker's all-time top 100 money earners, behind only Joe Hachem and Jamie Gold.
A native of Toronto, Daniel recognized early on in his life that he had a knack for gambling and, quite specifically, poker. So confident was he that at the age of twenty-one Daniel dropped out of college - just one credit shy of graduation - and moved to Las Vegas to pursue poker full-time.
With two first place finishes at the 1997 World Poker Finals at Foxwoods, Daniel took the world of tournament poker by storm and never looked back. He has since added three World Series of Poker bracelets, two World Poker Tour titles, and more than thirty victories in tournaments across the globe. To date, Daniel has earned almost $10,000,000 in tournaments alone.
Now, as recognizable for his kind demeanor and down to earth attitude as he is for his incredible abilities at the card table, Daniel Negreanu has to many become the very personification of a successful professional poker player.
What follows is part one of a two-part interview.
Justin: How have you been affected by going from just being a good card player, to gaining notoriety as one of the best poker players in the world?
Daniel: Well, I just don't think about it. If you get caught up in that stuff you'll go down the wrong road and stop focusing on what's important. For me, I just basically try to be who I am. I have a very good, grounded group of friends, and a social life that keeps me from buying into the whole celebrity BS thing.
It's not something I've ever been too involved with, anyway. I don't go "ooh" and "ahh" over meeting celebrities. I don't find that I'm any more special than anyone else. Maybe as a byproduct that's why a lot of people relate to me, because I don't act like a "celebrity."
Justin: Do you go out of your way to keep your personal and professional lives separate like a lot of players seem to do?
Daniel: Not really. I have a poker table here, but we don't really play a lot. We do play a lot of games, though the games we play are generally not poker. I play golf almost every day, we play pool, we do the Wii bowling. Of course, we gamble on everything, but we don't play cards much.
All my friends play poker, but they're not necessarily big named players you'd know, just guys I grew up playing with in Toronto. We spend a lot of time together just hanging out, being kids, playing games.
Justin: So tell me about your High Stakes Golf experience...
Daniel: It's going to air on ESPN. Basically it's a bunch of us poker players putting up a bunch of money and playing a golf tournament. But we put up our own money, so it's not like golf that you'd normally see on a network. It's got a really cool reality feel to it. We had a bunch of horrible golfers playing for tons of money.
Justin: Would you consider yourself a horrible golfer?
Daniel: Yeah, of course! I guess they say that only 5% of the people that play golf break 100, so I guess I'm in the top 5%. But comparatively, to real golfers, I'm terrible.
Justin: Does being a professional poker player help ease your nerves while you're out there on the course playing for cash?
Daniel: Oh yeah! Absolutely. You'll see it on the show, too. There's a lot of talk about that. When you golf and you have your normal swing, you're playing practice rounds, that's one thing, But when you actually have more pressure on all of a sudden stuff starts falling apart, you get more tense, four foot puts become impossible. Being a professional poker player helps a lot in that area, because like you said you're used to tense situations.
The big difference with golf is that it's totally up to you, not the turn of a card. You screw it up, it's all you. You just gotta have mind over matter, really just bear down. I think a lot of poker players are addicted to the adrenaline rush. After you play high stakes poker for so many years, you lose that a little bit. With golf, you get that adrenaline rush all over again.
Justin: That's interesting, actually, because I think most people would say that watching golf is far from "exciting."
Daniel: That's funny, because I'm watching a tournament right now.
Justin: I asked Kenna James last week if he'd ever shot an angle at the table, so I thought I might ask you the same question.
Daniel: No. I'm old school in that regard. If there are rules I can push the envelope with, by all means I'll do everything within the rules that I can that's not necessarily cheesy to extract extra information. For example, if I'm in a hand on the turn and I might be counting my chips out. I'm not betting yet, but I'm making it look like I might just to get a reaction from my opponent to see if he'll call or not. I've got no problem with stuff like that, but I'm good enough that I don't need to play the game with angles.
Justin: A few months ago one of the authors on Poker Pages wrote an article on the rule that states that any player at the table can ask to see either player's hand when there's a showdown in Texas Hold'em. It seems like the rule gets completely abused, used as a way for players to get more information.
Daniel: It does. A lot of people don't understand the meaning of the rule. I think a lot of internet players who are used to hand histories just want to see cards and may not realize it's disrespectful. But the rule was created to identify collusion or cheating. Basically, if you ask to see somebody's cards, if you're using the rule properly, you're accusing them or being suspicious of them cheating with the other player.
It's not a rule that you're supposed to use in order to gain information about your opponents, to answer the question of, "I wonder how he plays or what cards he had." That's not what the rule is intended for. If a player does that too often, he can lose his right to ask to see the hole cards, I think. For example, if [tournament director] Jack McClelland comes over and there's a player continually asking to see cards, Jack can disallow that person to ask that question anymore.
Justin: Have you ever encountered cheating at a table, yourself?
Daniel: Actually, it's funny. The only time I ever got cheated was when I was back in Toronto in a private hotel room with a guy named Blacky Blackburn, a guy named Tex, and some other apparently notorious cheats that set me up in a game back when I was about 18 or 19 years old. I think it was mostly marking cards, fixing the deck, stuff like that. I'm not really knowledgeable about cheating and cheating tactics, but I know I got cheated there, that's for sure.
Justin: Do you think that players that get the bulk of their experience online are bringing some kind of emotional inexperience to the table?
Daniel: They don't have poker etiquette. They don't understand it because they didn't grow up playing live poker. There are other things they do, too. When you grow up playing live poker, you learn a few things. First of all, you don't stall. That's cheating. You get a lot of kids on the internet that just do that anyway, and are totally open about it.
The other aspect is that they don't understand how to treat the "sucker." I used to come to Las Vegas in my early twenties, we'd come and there would be about six or seven professionals. Then the tourist came into the game and he got treated really well. "Hey, how you doin'!" People would ask him. "How've you been. When you coming back to town? You going to the fight?" You'd just treat the guy really nicely because you understand that he's your bread and butter.
Well, with online poker you don't have to be nice to anybody. You can be a "nit," if you will, and don't have to worry about the social aspect of being a host. Playing in a live cash game, if you want the guy to come back you better not piss him off.
Justin: That reminds me of an adage I heard when I first started playing, to not "educate the fish."
Daniel: I don't mind educating players that are making mistakes, but you don't discourage them from making these kinds of plays. If a guy wants to play goofy and loud and wants to have a good time, you're supposed to encourage that kind of play and make it look like you're doing the same thing. The last thing you want to do is look at someone who's been playing too many hands and say something like, "What are you playing that hand for?" You'll scare him into not playing those kinds of hands. It's so counter-productive.
Justin: You're a frequent player on High Stakes Poker. I'm just curious about what draws you to playing such a high stakes game, putting so much money at risk at once.
Daniel: It's not a lot of money. I know it seems like a lot of money, but it's a smaller game than the game we normally play in. Significantly smaller. It's actually just fun, you know. It's a fun show, it's really well done, exciting, good television. It's especially fun to play with these guys and then later look and see what they had against you, so while you're giving away information you're gaining information as well.
Justin: What were your thoughts on the World Series of Poker Europe?
Daniel: I have mixed emotions about it right now. I'm really not sure where I stand. The World Series of Poker has always been an event that has happened at one time of the year in Las Vegas. You know, I'm all for moving the World Championship from year to year to a different city or country. However, turning it into a tour, having an event in Europe and in the US... if it stops there it wouldn't be so bad, but my fear is that we'll end up with a WSOP Asia, a WSOP Australia, and then you'll see the effect of fewer professionals traveling because there's too much traveling already.
Right now, the WSOP is unique because it's one spot and all the world's best players are there, as opposed to something like the World Poker Tour where some players go to "x" event, and others don't, and you never have such a high concentration of top players.
Justin: Do you think the World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas has lost its prestige?
Daniel: Oh, yeah. Well, the event is gone, as far as what it once was. It once was an event in which a world champion was crowned, something really prestigious, and I really don't see it that way anymore. It really just is a question of numbers, structure. I could see a lot of changes.
For example, if it's the world championship, why are there ten or twenty tournaments that have bigger buy-ins? The real world championship should be the biggest buy-in event in the world. There are four events at the World Series of Poker alone that often have buy-ins at or above $10,000.
It's a shame, too, because of the public view... you see random people so much. But the fact is that it's just a sheer numbers thing. You've got 7,000 random people and 200 pros. When you make that comparison it's very, very difficult to see pros consistently at the final table. I think those types of things are good for poker, that having the Cinderella story is okay. But when it's nine Cinderellas out of ten tournaments, then it ceases to be a Cinderella story.
Justin: What kind of changes would you make to the WSOP Main Event, given the opportunity?
Daniel: If I was in charge, the first thing I would do would be to raise the buy-in to either $50,000 or $100,000. The second thing I would do would be to change the format completely. I would change it from a typical tournament to a shootout style tournament in which you have to win each table that you're at. It wouldn't be a four-hour shootout, it would take like fourteen hours to win your table.
If you had, say, 8,000 players, after day one you'd have 800, then you'd have 80, eight tables of ten, and you'd do the same thing. What that does is it tests overall skill, not just ring game but short-handed as well. You can't just sit there and wait for good cards. Also, and this is the important thing, it limits the amount of chips an amateur can win off of other amateurs without ever facing a professional.
By changing it to a shootout style event, each time you win your table everyone starts all over on a level playing field. Can you imagine the odds of an amateur winning the event if he had to first beat a table of nine, then a table of nine that just won a table? Not only that, but if he wins that table, he'd have to play off against nine other guys that won two straight shootouts. Now, if guys have won two straight shootouts, you can assume one thing... they don't suck. The odds of an amateur winning under that structure would be less than 1%.
Justin: But isn't there still a part of you that craves winning the Main Event?
Daniel: No, I couldn't care less about winning that tournament! There's like the lowest amount of skill in that event of any tournament throughout the entire year.
I enjoy the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E event. That's a fun event because there's a high concentration of sophisticated play and sophisticated players.
Justin: So I know you're on the World Series of Poker Advisory Council. Are you pleased with the changes they made to that $50k H.O.R.S.E. event in 2007?
Daniel (chuckling): Well the whole event was my idea, so yeah I'm happy with what they've been doing with it! The other event that we're going to add this year, just to show people how cool this could be, is to add a $5,000 shootout no-limit event.
The problem with shootouts at the World Series now - they do have a couple, but they're $1,500 events and they only take about four hours to finish a table. If you have a four hour shootout, it's just a crap-shoot. But if you have a table that lasts twelve to fourteen hours, now you've got a shootout that's just a grueling test of skill.
Justin: You've recently become sponsored by PokerStars, and have always been involved with Full Contact Poker, so I'm interested to get your thoughts on the UIGEA and its effects.
Daniel: It's just so stupid! It's just so brain dead. For a government not to understand or not to see how much money could be raised for important causes, like helping those that suffered from Katrina or education... there's just so much free money to be made off of regulating something that they cannot control under any circumstances, that it's so beyond foolish for them not to take that route.
But, you know what, I don't really worry about it anymore. Poker is fine. The good news is that the US government doesn't rule the globe, so while poker may be taking hits from the UIGEA in the US, it's flourishing around the world. It's just something that can't be stopped.
Justin: Thanks for taking the time to let me pick your brain, Daniel. One last question... What do you want to be remembered for both as a person and as a poker player?
Daniel: Well, for one I'd like to be atop the record books in many areas that still compel me, and also be remembered for being a consistent winner long-term. But the best compliment I ever got in my life had nothing to do with poker. It came from my friends, who I hadn't seen in eight or nine years and said: "You haven't changed a bit."
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