How To Stack Daniel Negreanu

Written by: Scott Lum

No, I didn’t actually do it. In fact, I didn’t take a single chip from him but as soon as we made it into the money of the WSOP Kickoff Event #3, my table broke up and I got moved directly to Daniel’s left. So, that became my mantra: How can I stack Daniel Negreanu? How can take his chips?

I love playing against really good poker players. I love the challenge and the opportunity to learn. Playing against an all-time great was next level.

When I first started playing poker, I would be afraid to play against better players. Their aggression and knowledge of the right spots to attack were intimidating. But as I learned the game and spent more time purposefully studying it, I would create experiments that would put me in uncomfortable situations and try to work myself out of them.  This was the quickest way to solidify a new poker strategy and learn it through trial and error. Playing against better players and getting outside my comfort zone was one of the best ways to learn the game.

Benefits of playing against highly skilled players:

  1. Excellent Learning Opportunity: Watching how skilled players think about the game and react to different situations is invaluable. It’s great to observe their table habits, concentration, chip handling, and overall behavior at the table. Many small things we take for granted, they do differently.
  2. Strategy Execution: While you can read about different strategies and try them in-game, watching a skilled player execute them repeatedly is a quick way to solidify a concept. At one point, Daniel was one of the chip leaders in the tournament, and it was great to watch how he used his large stack and preflop aggression to apply pressure and accumulate chips.
  3. Heightened Attention: When playing against better players, I pay much more attention to the action throughout the game. I’m less likely to be distracted and run on cruise control, merely playing my cards.
  4. Constant Exposure: Repeated exposure to highly skilled players helps you feel more comfortable playing against them. Instead of being intimidated or surprised by their attacks, you learn to adjust your game to exploit their tendencies. As you build confidence playing against more skilled players it becomes more fun seeking them out.

When I come to Vegas, I search out tougher games and pay close attention to the best players, taking notes on what they’re doing differently so I can integrate it into my game. There were many things I would have never picked up on a TV live stream that became apparent sitting next to Daniel. Here are some of my notes watching Daniel Negreanu carve up the table.

1. Loose-Aggressive Play. Daniel plays a lot of hands and plays them aggressively. If he’s in a hand, he’s always open-raising when folded to and never limping. He’ll frequently 3-bets when facing an open-raise and is in position postflop. Playing against good players like Daniel out of position is extremely difficult. Even with a decent hand, it’s challenging to get to showdown because they will attack when the board becomes scary. He probably 3-bet 4 times in one hour. When was the last time you did that in a tournament? I was fortunate to have him on my right, where I could see his action before I acted.

2. Calm in the middle of a storm. Daniel is a big personality. People want to talk with him, take photos, he’s vlogging on his phone, he’s constantly talking to players and casino staff and while playing his hands with great skill. It helps that he’s had tons of practice, so the strategy in a low buy-in tournament is not too difficult, but it was great to watch him shift
his attention from one thing to another.

There were moments where I saw him between hands, briefly closing his eyes and taking a long, slow breath to center himself. I also find this to be the best way to calm myself at the table after a beat or to stay focused during a long session. A slow, cleansing breath goes a long way. It was great to see how he grounded himself in the middle of all that activity.

In one hand, he had his rivered nut flush beaten by flopped quads. He continued joking, pulled out his camera to vlog about it, and then continued playing and chatting as if nothing happened. Some people would have been shaken to lose a third of their stack with a beat like that (it was his second time getting beat by quad 5’s in the tournament), but he was back to 3-betting a few hands later. My takeaway was the importance of attention shifting and not letting distractions impact your play. You can socialize at the table but learn to shift attention and be hyper-focused when you have a playable hand.

3. Laser Focus: Daniel constantly watches the action at the table, sizing up his opponents based on how they react to different situations. When he talks, he’s constantly probing for information. He discusses possible hands and watches how his opponent reacts. Some of his chatter is fun socialization, but much of it is purposeful questioning to develop player exploits.

In one hand, he and I were in the blinds, and I made a comment, “No shame in a walk.” His reply was, “I would be ashamed if I ever let you walk.” In that one comment, he sized me up as a recreational fish and set the expectation that he’d attack me from the small blind if it was ever folded to him. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the table long enough for him to try. He may be friendly, but there are no friends in poker.

4. Impact that he has on others. When I first sat at the table, I was star-struck. I get to play with Daniel f’ing Negreanu. I was texting my friends, sharing photos with family, in other words, I was not paying attention to the action. I wasn’t getting many playable hands, but I couldn’t tell you the profile of the other players at the table. Some were highly skilled players who didn’t shy away from attacking him, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. It took me about half an hour to settle down and focus on the game.

My lesson was to get over it and get over it fast. The more I play in these tournaments, the more I’ll run across famous skilled players. I can’t let them distract me with their notoriety. On this day I had a big advantage. I only had 10-15 big blinds remaining and knew my shove ranges, so no matter what anyone did ahead of me, I had one action. But if I had 50 big blinds and was out of position with the good player, the game would have been much more brutal.

Playing against Daniel was an incredible learning experience. It was great to see how he acted at the table, how he sized up players and used his speech play to intimidate or gather information from his opponents, while maintaining a balanced focus in the whirlwind around him. These are great skills to model when we’re playing in a big tournament.

You might also like...

Responses