Posts Tagged ‘poker players vs athletes’

Daniel Negreanu earning More than Roger Federer?

Sunday, July 27th, 2014

Thanks to his $8.3 million cash in the 2014 WSOP Big One for One Drop, Daniel Negreanu is having an unbelievable year. In fact, he recently tweeted about how his tournament profits are looking right now, which you can see below:

Events 44
Cashes 12
Hours 416
Buyins $2,931,661
Payouts $10,247,143
Profit $7,315,482

As you can see, Negreanu is close to a 300% ROI on his tourney buy-ins this year. And Mirror UK took notice of this tweet and decided to do something very interesting with it. They compared how Kid Poker is doing financially to some other top athletes this year. Converting Negreanu’s winnings into pounds, he has £4.2 million, which ranks ahead of some of those listed below:

1. Tiger Woods – £7.6 million
(2. Negreanu – £4.2 million)
2. Roger Federer – £4.1 million
3. Phil Mickelson – £2.9 million
4. David Beckham – £2.9 million

Besides comparing Negreanu to big-name athletes, another interesting thing that Mirror does is look at the top 10 earners from the PGA, ATP and poker. Here’s a look at their list:

1. Top 10 PGA players – $52,775,979
2. Top 10 ATP tennis players – $48,566,433
3. Top 10 Global Poker Index players – $47,870,710

Poker pros may not rank quite as high as professional golfers when it comes to winnings. However, they do rank pretty comparably to tennis pros, trailing them by just under $1 million so far.

So what’s the lesson to kids here? Give up spending hours sweating your ass off in the hot sun trying to be a tennis pro or golfer – instead opting for studying opponents’ 4-betting range? Well, we don’t expect poker popularity among the youth to experience a sudden spike simply because of Negreanu’s great year. However, the Mirror’s research does go to show that poker is no doubt a lucrative game that pays very well when somebody is running hot.