Daniel Negreanu — Kid Poker
By Trevor Cole
Originally published in Toronto Life magazine, 2005
Daniel Negreanu pulls an inch-thick wad of cash from his pocket, peels off $1,570 (U.S.), which makes hardly a dent, and slips it to his rotund friend, David. It’s fifteen minutes before noon on a December Wednesday, near the tournament sign-in desk of Las Vegas’s Bellagio hotel-casino, and Negreanu is bankrolling David’s buy-in for the seven-card-stud tournament that’s about to begin. Negreanu himself is already signed up—mighty grudgingly, as you’ll hear—as are more than a hundred other players, some of them famous and rich, many more of them, like David, not. The Bellagio, being the blistering sun of the Vegas poker universe, pulls them all in. “Most of these people are beggars,” says a veteran poker journalist, surveying the crowd. “They’re begging for entries, trying to get a big score.”
It used to be that a lot of them headed straight for Negreanu, who for a while was staking the tournament buy-ins for as many as fourteen players, including one-time girlfriend Evelyn Ng, now a frequent face in women’s tournaments, then taking half to two-thirds of the profits. Negreanu refuses to hide the fact, he says, that a lot of “the so-called tournament stars don’t have a pot to piss in. Many of the top names were playing for me.” It got so complicated he had to use a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. But then it just got to be too much work, people were constantly bugging him for money. This is what happens when you’ve established yourself as one of the top poker players in the world, a 30-year-old millionaire who also happens to be a nice guy from Toronto.
As if to demonstrate the problem, immediately after Negreanu finishes with David, three more people come up to him in quick succession. The first is a large, eastern European player who likes to call himself “the Armenian Express.” He pulls Negreanu across the Bellagio’s rich carpet toward the entrance to one of the casino bars, unfurls a plastic bag and presents him with a gift—a bottle of Armenian cognac—as a token of gratitude for all his financial help over the past months. Negreanu, as a vegetarian health-food fanatic, happens to hate cognac, but he accepts the gift with grace. “In this field it is hard to find people like Daniel,” the Armenian Express will tell me later. “Please put that down, he help a lot of people. I’m getting goose bumps talking about him.”
After that comes “Cowboy,” a grizzled hunter of coyotes and bobcats in the Nevada wilds with a tattered black Stetson and a stubbly grin. He greets Negreanu by knuckle-rubbing him on the back, and when Negreanu spins around, Cowboy draws an imaginary six-shooter off his hip and fires at him. “Dagnabit Rabbit!” he drawls. Then comes an exchange of bizarre conversational nonsense: “Hey, flabbity, bab glabbidy,” says Negreanu. “Abby dabby dooby,” replies Cowboy. This goes on for half a minute, after which Cowboy, who actually has a speech affliction that makes it hard to decipher much of what he says (and which seems to have been the inspiration for this exchange), wraps his arm around Negreanu and thanks him sincerely for helping out a friend of his—a young man who already owed Negreanu money, but didn’t have enough cash to properly bury his just deceased father. “Daniel come up and give him about $1,500,” Cowboy will later explain. “He got my ultimate respect right there.”
Last comes a middle-aged woman who pulls Negreanu aside and tries to convince him to give her money because of her ailing kidneys. Maybe she’s heard Negreanu tell someone what he’s told me—that he considers himself to have been put on earth with a gift: “To make a lot of money quickly, and put it in good places.” Perhaps she’s heard that not long ago he shelled out $50,000 for celebrated poker pro Layne Flack’s trip through drug rehab, or maybe she’s just approaching him because he’s rich. Whatever her reasons, Negreanu’s not buying. If there’s one thing that separates him as a poker player, it’s his ability to read people. “That lady was full of it,” he tells me. “I didn’t like her because she’s been very pushy with people and pushy with me, like I have to help her. I can’t help out everybody who’s broke.”
The burdens and gratitudes of the world thus addressed in the span of a few minutes, Daniel Negreanu, nice guy from Toronto, now has to spend the next twelve hours or so playing cards with people who wish they were him, and want badly to beat him.
In the realm of sports and gaming, you may have noticed, poker, especially the version known as Texas Hold‘em, has suddenly seized a blazing spotlight. It’s all over the internet, and all over TV. A few years ago there was but one poker tournament that boasted a million dollar prize—the World Series of Poker (WSOP) at the seedy Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas—now there are as many as 18. In Las Vegas, where many hotel casinos closed down their poker action as popular interest dwindled, poker rooms are now absolute musts. Bally’s, the Mirage, Caesar’s Palace, Harrah’s, the Alladin, the Rio, the new Steve Wynn—these and more have opened or are opening poker rooms, accounting for as many as 200 new tables on the Strip in the span of a year. Veteran dealers at the Bellagio shake their heads as poker players get asked for autographs, and elsewhere tourists buy bobble-head dolls of their favourite Hold’em stars.
The popular explosion started just three years ago, when the Travel Channel in the United States began programming the World Poker Tour. And what made it different from previous American television coverage was an innovation borrowed from a Channel Four program in Britain, Late Night Poker, that had begun three years before: tiny hidden cameras positioned to show each player’s “hole” cards, which transformed a static, boring, untelegenic event into an intriguing spectator sport. Now viewers could not only see the results of a gutsy bluff or a stupid call, they could watch it taking place. And because of the internet, the urges generated by these inside views could find easy release in online poker rooms (and, near Toronto, at live poker rooms in Casino Rama and the Brantford Charity Casino), further transforming a spectator sport into a participatory one. And suddenly anyone could pretend to be Johnny Chan, the two-time WSOP champion made famous by the Matt Damon movie Rounders, or Phil “the Poker Brat” Hellmuth, who won it at age 24. Or, these days, more likely, “Kid Poker” himself, Daniel Negreanu.
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Negreanu seems so young, and so comfortable in his Vegas environs, it’s easy to imagine his life began here. But as a boy growing up around Finch and Leslie, Negreanu hardly ever played cards; his parents, working class immigrants from Romania, seldom brought out a deck, and had Old World images of gamblers as people who sold their wives. It was only after one rare visit from a card-playing uncle that Negreanu, at seven or eight years old, started playing with cards like toys. He’d pit the five of spades against the three of clubs in combat, as if they were action figures, and the higher denomination, being stronger, always won.
His first gaming interest was billiards—he hustled snooker during his early years at North York’s A.Y. Jackson Collegiate. But he had a hunger for statistics, and a love of money, that pool didn’t satisfy. After a few games of poker in a friend’s basement, when he was about seventeen. he started to learn the game, and like it. Soon he was bringing cards and poker chips to his high school, skipping classes and playing with friends throughout the day, and going home a little richer every night.
In this, Negreanu displayed one quality, which he considers unique and probably equipped him well for the potentially intimidating world of high-stakes poker: a disdain for authority, and an ability to manipulate it. He says, “I like breaking the rules.” But he understood the value of making himself appealing, of cloaking his rebellion in pleasant colours — when he slept on the floor during class, or munched on food at his desk, he did it without aggravating his teachers. And he discovered he had a gift not just for reading people, but for figuring out how to play their weaknesses. “At a very early age,” he says, “I knew how to push people’s buttons.”
Among a throng of poker tables, each crowded with as many as ten players and a dealer, Negreanu’s is easy to pick out. Most players sit, mute and sullen, staring at the pot — maybe because, as Kid Poker says, they’re broke — but at his table, players actually chat, sometimes even smile. You could call this the Negreanu Effect. “He’s got a great way of approaching people and a great way of approaching the table,” says Kian Kaveh, a Las Vegas doctor who plays frequently in tournaments and has known Negreanu for several years. “Of all the people I could lose to, I’d rather lose to Danny.”
Slight, boyish and always wired to some kind of digital contraption—some days it’s an iPod, today it’s a Palm Treo—the two-earring kid from Toronto has an attribute besides his talent that sets him apart in the poker world: He seems strangely happy. If there’s a player bopping to music at a poker table, snapping his fingers and swaying in his chair, it’s Negreanu. If there’s a player jumping up from his seat and running around the room, or carrying on a loud comic conversation with someone beyond the velvet rope, known as “the rail,” where spectators gather during tournaments, it’s Negreanu. Veteran Vegas observers, of which Cowboy is one, know the effect this can have on his opponents. “He puts a lot of people off their game because he’s giggling, laughing, having a good time. They say, ‘Boy, he’s a kid, he ain’t got it together.’” Cowboy just chuckles and lets his dry old mouth form one word. “Wrong.”
“Sure it’s an act,” says the poker journalist Mike Paulle, one of the top writers in the game. “The people that don’t know him are fooled by it. Those of us who have been around him a long time and watched him are not fooled. He’s an assassin.”
Negreanu disputes that his personality is false. Phil Helmuth once described Negreanu’s nice-guy image as “created” and Negreanu told him loudly, “I didn’t create an image, you donkey! I’m not putting on a show. You just are who you are!” But on this December Wednesday in the Bellagio tournament area, as a hundred players fondle and stack their chips until they sound like a thousand crickets chirping, Negreanu’s apparent good humour may be more act than usual. He actually wishes he could be anywhere but here, in his champagne-coloured chair under the Tiffany chandeliers and red, gold and blue canopies. For one thing, he hates playing near slot machines, which flank the tournament area on either side—“That’s stupid; but the Bellagio is a joke”—and for another, the event he’s involved in, one of a series of lesser tournaments with prize pools in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (setting the stage for a major $5.47 million event in the middle of the month), is less lucrative than the cash games he could be playing about 40 paces away, in the Bellagio’s exclusive high-limit room, against regulars like Céline Dion’s husband René Angelil, and top pros like Ted Forrest and Phil Ivey. “I don’t play that many tournaments, only the big ones,” Negreanu tells me. “These are small events I would not have played.”
He certainly doesn’t need the money. Having won three major tournaments in the past 12 months, survived to the “final table” (where the final eight or 10 players in a tournament compete for the big money and, in the case of World Poker Tour events, points) an impressive 10 times, and accumulated $2,650,003 in tournament winnings, Negreanu could right now be relaxing at home in the land of golf courses northwest of the city, in the suburb of Summerlin, where he’s lived the last two years. He could be spending time with his mother who’s visiting from Toronto (he calls her “Mommy”) and his new year-and-a-half-old Chihuahua, Mushu (“I hate being away from him”). Or he could be off in Grand Rapids, Michigan, settling a few issues with his new fiancé, who’s starting to chafe against the peripatetic lifestyle of the tournament pro.
So what’s he doing here? He’s playing for pride. The five-foot-nine, 135 pound Negreanu happens to have a canyon-sized ego and, at the moment, he has a narrow lead in the race for the title of Card Player magazine’s 2004 Player of the Year. In the current age of internet-spawned one-win wonders, it’s a title that he feels has an especially nice ring.
The trouble is the prize, which seemed a sure thing just a few weeks ago, is now in jeopardy because another good player, a dapper Indonesian named John Juanda, has come up fast to sit a close second, and has vowed to play these Bellagio tournaments in a last-minute effort to pass him. “John’s going to play every one,” says Negreanu, “so he’s sort of forced my hand.”
Yesterday, in the first of the tournaments, it was Negreanu himself who “busted” Juanda in a hand, then playfully trash-talked him as Juanda gathered his things to leave. “Never send a boy to do a man’s job,” he teased, and “Good luck tomorrow; the rail’s that way.” Only a couple of hours later Negreanu was ousted himself—skill is no guarantee of success in the limited time-frame of a poker tournament—but he at least had the satisfaction of knowing his rival hadn’t gained ground.
Today, Negreanu, wearing a blue shirt and cap emblazoned with the logo of his latest endorsement, pokermountain.com, has barely taken his place among 110 players before he’s up, roaming the room, looking for Juanda. “He’s showing up late, that’s a good sign,” he says to no one in particular. “Probably slept in; he’ll be sleepy. That’s good.” He orders a glass of carrot juice from one of the Bellagio’s statuesque cocktail waitresses (who, hearsay has it, each make $1,000 a day) and sets to work.
Watching a live poker tournament, which puts the spectator at a distance from the tables and eliminates the TV advantage of knowing each player’s hole cards, steals one of the great pleasures of witnessing Negreanu in action: seeing his unsurpassed skill at analyzing the play to decipher which cards his opponents hold. During a series of televised hands at an event earlier in the year, he guessed accurately, out loud, time after time. “I was in the zone that day,” he remembers.
He’s at his best with big money on the line, and today, for a while at least, the zone seems out of his reach. His stack of chips rises and falls over the hours, but he gains no momentum. A poker tournament is a contest of attrition — betting limits rise throughout the day, forcing riskier and riskier play, and you win by hanging on as other players lose their chips and drop out. The best way to last is to amass a stack big enough to carry you through your inevitable miscalculations, but as player numbers dwindle from 110 to 80 to below 50, Negreanu works with a slim margin for error. Several times, he manages to stay afloat only by pulling in a pot just when things look bleakest. One hand, though, excites him enough that he rushes over to tell me about it.
It was a hand that evolved, like most high-stakes poker hands, into a battle between two players. On “fifth street” — that is, when the fifth of seven cards was dealt — things got interesting. “The guy bets me on fifth street,” says Negreanu, meaning his opponent came in with a large bet, perhaps hoping to scare him off. But Negreanu had a sense the player’s hole cards were worthless, and he told him so. “I said, ’You don’t have anything. I know you don’t have nothing.’” And when he said that, the man smiled. Negreanu, with a measly pair of fours, called the bet. When the next card came, the player shoved more chips into the pot. Negreanu, as he called once more, said to him, “You still have nothing and you’re betting?”
When the final card came, Negreanu had already decided that, with his own pitiful hand, he couldn’t afford to call another pricy bet; he’d have to fold. So he took control verbally. As his opponent reached for his chips, Negreanu told him, “Oh, if you bet now, you’re definitely bluffing.” And the player, clearly rattled, smiled sheepishly and said, “Okay, I give up.” Rather than bully Negreanu out of the hand, as he should have done, he checked. When the show of cards revealed the player had, indeed, nothing, and had lost the pot to Negreanu’s fours, he complained, “You talked me out of betting!” And Negreanu said, “That’s right.”
Throughout the day, as black-vested dealers are switched at the tables every 30 minutes and the nearby slot machines jangle and ping, Negreanu and John Juanda circle each other like cats, frequently getting up from their own tables to see how the other is doing. And at one point, Juanda makes a seemingly innocent gesture: he sends a waitress to Negreanu bearing a lime-topped bottle of Corona.
Negreanu reacts as observers have come to expect—wildly—and appears to treat this as merely droll gamesmanship. “I can’t believe it! He bought me a Corona!” He stands up, raises the bottle toward Juanda in salute, and shouts “Thank you!” over the tables. Afterward, he giggles about it. “That’s funny he did that.” But a dip back into Negreanu’s history suggests there was something not funny about it at all.
After high school, Negreanu had no intention of furthering his education anywhere but at a poker table. He spent a few years in his late teens and early 20s toiling in Toronto’s underground card rooms, one of them in a warehouse at Warden and Steeles, another in the North York Bridge Club on Bathurst. He battled against local pros at clubs like Check and Raise and Moshe’s Place, in an atmosphere not far removed, as he remembers it, from the grimy card room scenes in Rounders. With the advent of the roving charity casinos—about 20 of them, each with a few poker tables, moving around the city every three days—he began the slow upward progression of every ambitious poker pro.
Poker games, whether stud, Omaha or Hold’em, are defined by their limits, and each game has a set of two. While a $3–$6 game or a $4–$8 game (meaning $4 bets on the first few cards, and $8 bets thereafter) is for recreational players, a $10–$20 game is an early step in a poker pro’s evolution. By the time he’d mastered the $10–$20 games—or, more accurately, the people playing them—Negreanu was making about $40 an hour, 40 hours a week. He worked these games like a steady job until he was 21, when he felt ready to graduate to the next level. And that meant a trip to Las Vegas.
Things change when you move to the higher poker limits; player’s skills improve, and their ambitions expand. The jump from a $10–$20 game in Toronto to a $20–$40 game in Vegas was like going from local cable to network TV. Negreanu’s style was aggressive; he pushed people around with fierce betting, because in Toronto that method had worked. But in Vegas, his opponents pushed back. “I didn’t know how to deal with it,” he remembers. “I’d never seen this before.”
One night in particular, he got the message he was in over his head. He’d been playing at the famous Horseshoe Casino, and over the course of a few hours he’d lost his whole bankroll, a couple of thousand bucks. But it wasn’t the losing that got him. At about four in the morning, when he was cleaned out, he left six other players at the table to go to the bathroom. By the time he came out, the game had broken up.
“That’s the moment I knew,” he says. “I was the sucker. I was the meat. They were playing because of me.”
That moment became the source of his motivation. He remembered every single player in that game, especially a man named Hawaiian Bill, who’d pushed him around the most. He hated Hawaiian Bill. “When I came back to Vegas,” says Negreanu, “he was the guy I wanted to beat.”
Turned out, when Negreanu did come back to Vegas a month later, having restocked his bankroll at those $10-$20 games in Toronto, he discovered Hawaiian Bill was a heck of a guy. Bill became his first mentor. After a while, he found another, even better teacher, a respected cash-game player named Jennifer Harman, who took such a liking to Negreanu she let him “sweat” her (sit with her and see her cards during play) at her big limit games at the Bellagio against the heavyweights like 70-year-old Doyle Brunson, one of the game’s legends. By age 22, in 1997, Negreanu had climbed up the limit ladder—$40-$80, $75-$150, $200-$400—adapting to and mastering each rung, and finding his way equally well in tournaments, until he was named “Best all around player” at the World Poker Finals. At age 23, he won his first WSOP bracelet (the poker player’s trophy), in Pot-limit Hold’em, his very first WSOP event. Between 1997 and 1999, he racked up 12 major tournament wins, more than any other player on the tour. And in the year 2000, with all the momentum a player could want, he flew right off the rails.
‘I played golf, I screwed around, spent money, had fun,” he remembers now, with an offhand shrug. “It was a good year.” Rather than enter tournaments, he spent his nights at the big cash games, the $1,000-$2,000 games and higher, at Bellagio. If $20-$40 was TV, this was making movies with Scorsese, and he wasn’t up to it. He went broke, repeatedly—losing as much as $30,000 a night and hardly caring, making stupid money-management decisions. And the main reason was, he was drunk.
Negreanu’s open about this period, but it’s not clear whether he fully grasps the state he was in. He and his poker friends would go to dinner, he remembers, where they’d “have some wine, have a Bailey’s coffee. And there’s nothing really to do, so we’d play poker, still drinking Coronas and stuff.”
“Drunk” is Jennifer Harman’s word. “It was affecting his whole poker career,” she says. “It just crushed me to see him sit down at a game that was too big for him, knowing what his bankroll was. It just killed me. My stomach turned every time he did it.”
She tried “a million times,” she says, to get him to wise up. She tried to talk him out of sitting down at those games when all the other players saw him as easy money, the way they did his first trip to Vegas. But once he sat down, business was business. “Poker is ruthless,” says Harman. “If he’s in the game, I’m gonna try and beat him too.”
Poker is a game of self-discipline, she says. And over the last few years, “I’ve seen Daniel change for the better so much, it’s scary.” At the urging of his fiancé he’s become a practicing Christian (though with a more tolerant, Canadian bent) and a health nut, buying organic groceries from places like Whole Foods and sticking to the tofu at the immense Bellagio buffet. And he’s more career focused than ever, with an eye on cementing his place among the poker titans. That’s why he’s inked a deal to become the poker ambassador at the new Steve Wynn hotel opening up on the Strip, which will make him the face of their poker marketing and require that, outside of tournaments, he plays there exclusively, putting an end to his $2,000-$4,000 cash games at Bellagio (though many of the top pros will move with him). It’s one of the reasons he’s so annoyed with Annie Duke, one of the best women players, for her part in scuttling a deal he’d helped set up with Fox SportsNet that would have seen a group that included Negreanu play in a series called The Superstars of Poker. “I can’t stand that woman,” he seethes. “Egotistical, overrated phony, basically, in a nutshell.” And it’s why the title Player of the Year means so much to him. There’s hardly any money attached to the achievement, but these days any internet wannabe has a chance to luck into $5 million. To Negreanu, “Player of the Year” is an indicator of sustained excellence, and the discipline that makes a poker player great.
Today, at the Bellagio, he takes a few sips of the Corona that Juanda sent to him, with all its hidden meaning, then walks it over to a side table and leaves it there. “I’ve always lived under the philosophy,” he will tell me, “that making mistakes is okay, but learning nothing from them, that is a major mistake.” He keeps up a steady jabber for much of the day, interacting with waitresses who bring him drinks by accident (“I haven’t had a Coke in 14 years!”), with spectators who dare to light cigarettes close to the rail (“I smell smoke! I got a good nose for that. Who’s smoking? You!”) and never hesitating to open a handy copy of Card Player magazine in order to show the curious pros who come up to him why exactly he’s here. “It’s the Player of the Year! It’s got the points here, the standings in all the categories.” He taps his name at the top of the list. “See? Number one.”
After 11 hours, after a spectator has shouted, “Daniel Negreanu, you’re my hero!” and after a thousand checks and raises, he finally exits the tournament just out of the points, in 11th place—knocked out by David, the man he bankrolled. Then he heads for the sign-in desk, flips one of the $5,000 chips he has in his back pocket onto the counter, and pays up for the next day’s event. And with every action, he behaves as if he’s a happy man in a luck-blessed world.
But he’s not. “What a waste of a day,” he grumbles, out of earshot of the other players. On the way to the valet parking area, he complains about the mistakes an opponent made that led to his own ouster. When he climbs into a sleek white Lexus SC430 convertible, his own personal rolling cloud, his hand hovers over the digital control console, which the valet guys have a habit of changing. “What did that guy do? He messed with this! Why do people touch my stuff?” This is the side of Negreanu that his opponents may never see, which is one of the things, in Cowboy’s mind, that makes him a real pro. “He’s not gonna let you know you got to him.”
And once he’s through venting, he’s not going to dwell on it much, either. Regret’s not a useful attribute for a poker player. But you know he’s smart enough to learn, yet again, from whatever mistakes he made. How do you know? Go into any poker room, says Negreanu, and find the highest-limit tables. “Those will be the smartest people in the room.”
Over the course of two weeks’ worth of preliminary tournaments at the Bellagio, as Negreanu came back day after day with no luck, a player named David Pham, Card Player magazine’s Player of the Year in 2000, leapfrogged first Juanda in the standings and then Negreanu to take the points lead. Going into the big event, Bellagio's Five-Diamond World Poker Classic No-Limit Hold-em tournament with 376 entrants and a buy-in of $15,300, Negreanu had to make it to the final table in order to secure the title. And Kid Poker, true to his pledge to learn from his mistakes, did make the final table, along with Johnny Chan, Jennifer Harman and six others. And then, with Cowboy dryly grinning from somewhere on the rail, he proceeded to win the event, and $1.7 million.