Posts Tagged ‘poker tournament winnings’

See Daniel Negreanu’s Lavish House

Wednesday, August 27th, 2014

Ever wondered what nearly $30 million in poker tournament winnings and a sweet long-term deal with PokerStars will get you? Daniel Negreanu recently gave us a glimpse by offering up a tour of his futuristic Las Vegas home.

As he says in the video below, Negreanu had a couple of friends renovate his place about a year ago to the theme of “Austin Powers meets Pee-Wee Herman.” I’m not sure if they teach this style in interior decorating school, but it looks like Kid Poker’s friends came reasonably close to the goal.

One of the more-interesting pieces in Negreanu’s not-so-humble abode is a tall green booth near his dinner table, which is definitely shagadelic. So is the blue lamp above his table, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life.

Of course, being one of the world’s best poker players, it’s little surprise that Negreanu also has a nice poker table in his home. He must be really into Game of Thrones too because he’s got a box on the table that plays music from the show when it’s opened.

Another thing that Negreanu shows off is his arcade, with one machine that features 8,000 games and a beer tap on the side. Next to the arcade is his trophy area, where he displays six WSOP gold bracelets and pictures of him with Barack Obama. I’ll spare you the rest of the details from the house and just let you watch the video yourself. At two and a half minutes, this clip won’t take up too much of your time.

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Daniel Negreanu: “Even when I went broke, I woke up the next day ready to kick ass”

Thursday, May 29th, 2014

With a lucrative PokerStars sponsorship deal and over $21 million in poker tournament winnings, Daniel Negreanu is one of the richest players in the world. So it’s weird to think of him as once being broke. But like pretty much every poker pro, Negreanu did go through a period in Toronto where he struggled to make it. However, as he told iGaming, he never let his bankroll problems keep him from sticking with poker.

“Even when I went broke, I woke up the next day ready to kick ass,” Negreanu said. “There was no quit in me and I was determined to learn how to play better after getting beat. When I was getting beat I paid attention to why I was getting beat and I was trying to learn from every situation. Of course there was bad luck, but even at that age I didn’t believe that my losses were just due to being unlucky. It was more the sense of, ‘What am I doing wrong?'”

Obviously Negreanu worked through his early issues to become one of the game’s best. And this allowed him to realize his dream of playing against other top players in the WSOP. To hear Negreanu describe it, the WSOP, and Las Vegas poker in general, was much more exclusive:

Playing a WSOP event was big back in the day, it was for real men! It’s not like nowadays with all those pansy 1ks. The minimum buy in was $2,000 and most of them were $3,000 or $5,000. If you wanted to play small you’d play satellites, while nowadays there’s even $20 events going on everywhere, so I think it has lost a lot of its luster in terms of having that financial barrier. If you think to the nineties, the smallest buy in was bigger than it is now, which is kind of backwards if you ask me.

If someone sat down at your table and you didn’t know them there was no chance they were any good. It was just impossible, because if they were good, they would’ve been in Vegas playing before that. The biggest change with today is, if you sit down at a table there’s some 20-year old kid I don’t recognize and people tell me that he’s won $4,000,000 online that year. That’s the huge difference, now the unknowns are much stronger while back then those were probably just businessmen who came to enjoy themselves

If you’d like to see more on what Negreanu had to say about the old days of poker, we highly encourage you to check out Part I and the more-entertaing Part II of his iGaming interview.

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Antonio Esfandiari wows Vegas crowd with his Magic Skills

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

They don’t call him the “Magician” for nothing! Famed poker pro Antonio Esfandiari, who used to be a professional magician, recently did some street magic for a Las Vegas crowd. As you can see in the clip below, he does the classics to perfection by putting a cigarette through a quarter and guessing which card a woman has on her mind.

Another interesting part of the clip is where Esfandiari explains how he got into magic in the first place. “I remember the first time I saw magic I was completely hypnotized by it,” he said. “I was sitting at the counter of this restaurant Left in Albuquerque in the Bay Area, I was a kid, 17 years old. Then the bartender said, ‘What’s your favorite card. He pulled out a deck of cards and I named a card – all of the sudden he pulled out the deck and the only card face-up was the card that I picked.”

After this, Esfandiari set out to learn how to do these tricks himself and bewilder audiences just as had been done to him. He went to a magic shop and the owner helped him get started on the quest to becoming a magician.

Over the years, Esfandiari has created plenty of magic on the poker tables too. He’s the all-time leader in live tournament winnings with $26,219,676. Esfandiari managed to gain some mainstream fame when he took down the 2012 Big One for One Drop, which paid out a record $18,346,673 prize.

He’s continued his success in high rollers by placing fourth in the $111k One Drop ($1,433,438) and fourth in the 2014 PCA $100k Super High Roller ($575,920). It’ll definitely be interesting to see how he does in the 2014 Big One when it comes back at this year’s WSOP after a one-year absence.

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Find out Phil Ivey’s Greatest Weakness

Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

Phil Ivey is generally regarded as the world’s best all-around poker player. So “weakness” isn’t usually a word that’s associated with his game. Nevertheless, Ivey is human just like anybody else and has his poker flaws – however minor they might be.

The 37-year-old actually pointed out what he believes his greatest weakness is during a short interview with ALLIN Mag. When asked about the subject, Ivey stated:

My greatest weakness is that I act too fast on some of my hands. A lot of times, I know what my decisions are pretty quickly, I know what I’m going to do and I’ll just do it instead of like, think about it a little bit. I just act too quick, like I’ll bet too quick or I’ll go to bluff someone too quickly instead of thinking about the situation. Because a lot of times I’ll make a bad decision and realize later ‘Wow, if I would’ve really took my time and thought about this I would’ve made a better decision. You know, but I just reacted because a lot of my game is just reacting. So you know, that’s one thing I have to work on is taking my time a little bit more.

When pressed for advice on how you get better at being patient, Ivey added, “You just practice it, you just take your time in key decisions. You think you know what to do, and you say ‘Well I’m gonna take another 40 second to just really think about the decision.”

I think that most poker players would be quite lucky to have their biggest problem be acting too fast. The majority of amateurs spend forever tanking, only to make a bad decision in the end anyways. So for Ivey to complain of acting overly quick, this seems like an easy leak to fix.

It’s probably hard for Ivey to find ways to improve his game since he’s already accomplished so much. Ivey has won 9 WSOP gold bracelets, $17,669,367 in tournament winnings, and almost $17 million in online poker. Of course, his recent online results could be better since he’s lost about $2.7 million in the last year. So maybe this is where the fast-acting leak is occurring the most.

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Vanessa Selbst discusses Link between Poker Players and Investors

Monday, October 28th, 2013

Thanks to the fact that she’s the women’s all-time leader in poker tournament winnings with $8 million and has a Yale Law School degree, Vanessa Selbst gets a lot of mainstream attention. So it was little surprise when Bloomberg TV interviewed her in a segment dedicated to the link between poker players and investors.

The reason for the sudden interest in poker on Bloomberg’s part is due to their new show, Poker Night on Wall Street. Rather than having pros compete against each other, this TV show pits successful hedge fund managers like Bill Perkins and David Einhorn against each other.

When asked why she thought these Wall Street guys could be good at poker, Selbst said, “Absolutely, there’s so many similarities, cross-overs between the two industries. You’re taking calculated risks, processing a world of information that’s at your disposal.”

Selbst also discussed how the math aspect of poker favors investors. “It’s a game of numbers, it’s a game of pushing small edges,” she said. “Another skill that is important is to take the downswings, and not go on tilt as we say, and really be OK with losing for a long time in a row. You know, just like investments that were maybe a good idea at the time, and they just went the wrong way.”

Moving away from the investors, the two-time WSOP poker champ also had some advice on what the average player does wrong. “I would say that they don’t play their hands aggressively enough. They kind of get scared that they don’t have the best hand, so they don’t capitalize – they don’t maximize their gains when they have the best hand.” She added that players really need to go after it when they think that they’ve got the top hand.

Vanessa Selbst has certainly never been afraid to go after a pot when she thinks that she’s in the lead. And the $8 million-plus that she’s earned certainly indicates this fact. Seeing as how Selbst has collected over $2.4 million in tournaments this year, you can count on seeing her in the winner’s circle plenty more in the future.

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Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott tells Young Pros to “Get off the Laptops”

Monday, October 21st, 2013

When it comes to poker players with street cred, few have anything on Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott. The famed British pro was a street fighter, part of a safe-cracking team, served two prison terms (27 months total), worked as a bouncer, and played in dangerous underground poker games. Taking all of this into account, he’s somewhat of the anti-online poker player, who sits on their computer for hours grinding each day.

And this was part of Ulliott’s message in a recent interview with PokerListings, where he advised that young players “get off their laptops” more often and live life.

Ulliott began the interview by talking about how he was kicked out of home at age 16 because he was “running with the wrong crowd.” Devilfish also discussed how, during his early poker years, he played in the type of underground games where you needed a gun in your pocket.

Then the interview switched to the subject of young online poker players, at which point Ulliott quipped that he could “out-fight ’em, out-fu** ’em, out-think ’em, out-drink ’em, out-sing ’em and out-bling ’em.”

Cheesy quotes aside, Devilfish had some very good advice for younger players as he said that “life passes you by pretty quickly” and “you gotta get out there, and get off them laptops. and get out there and live.” He added, “There’s a lot of stuff to be doing, you know. Not just sitting there on a computer. Most of ’em (young pros), they couldn’t tell you a good story because they haven’t got any.”

As we’ve covered so far, Devilfish definitely has lots of life experiences and stories to draw upon. And he’s always got some very interesting things to say as well.

In regard to his poker career, Ulliott ranks second among UK players with $6,193,273 in tournament winnings. His tourney earnings have remained somewhat stagnant because he mainly plays cash games these days. But regardless of whether he wins another tournament or not, Devilfish will always be one of the poker world’s most dynamic figures.

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Jake Cody and Hans Vogl sign Online Poker Deals

Friday, November 18th, 2011

The past few days have seen some big online poker signings with both Jake Cody and Hans Vogl inking sponsorship deals. Cody was the biggest signing since the UK poker pro is one of only four players to have won poker’s triple crown (WSOP, EPT and WPT title).

What’s truly amazing about this is that Cody’s major titles have come within a two-year span. In 2010, he won the EPT Deauville ($1,213,194) and WPT London ($425,492) tournaments, while 2011 saw him take down the WSOP $25k Heads-up title ($851,192) to complete the triple crown. In all Cody has $2,870,822 in poker tournament winnings.

After signing with PKR, Cody talked about how excited he was over the sponsorship deal by saying, “I’m very excited about joining Team PKR Pro. I’ve been patient with sponsorship, waiting for the right deal to come along.” He also added, “When I spoke to PKR I was really impressed with the whole setup and the ideas that they have going forward, and I knew straight away I wanted to be part of it! It’s a great site to be involved with right now and I think I can help take it to the next level.”

Hans Vogl may not be as decorated as Jake Cody, but Betfair saw enough in the self-taught grinder and poker writer to offer a deal. His best tournament finish is a 5th place effort in the 2007 Aussie Millions ($318,112) event, and his career earnings amount to $412,581.
Vogl started out playing low stakes online poker games, and was fairly average in the beginning. However, in just three short years, he transformed into a pro player through hard work and persistence. The new Team Betfair member spoke about his transformation by saying, “Hard work I would say. Reading books, analyzing hand histories, discussing hands with friends. Then of course playing, playing and playing to get into a routine. It is also important to have self-discipline in order to avoid chasing losses or going on tilt.”

Betfair manager Asko Heiskanen also discussed the signing by saying, “We are always looking for great players who can represent Betfair. Hans has demonstrated time and time again that he is a player of extraordinary skills. We believe there’s much more to come from him and we are delighted he has joined Team Betfair.”

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