Daniel Negreanu Is All In
How the world’s greatest (and nicest) poker player peddles the art of deception
In the sleazy niche of online gambling videos, Daniel Negreanu glows like a candle. He is a jolly, impish Canadian, and perhaps the world’s greatest poker player. He is also the internet’s favorite gambler: Negreanu’s vlogs and instructional videos receive millions of views, his subscribers are supportive, civil, and legion, and adoring sycophants splice his spectacular moments into popular and reverent highlight reels. He is an anomaly in this virtual quagmire, which tends to reward aggressive, martial masculinity. Most videos in the genre glorify angry men losing their money and minds; Negreanu’s are calm and thoughtful. Many include Negreanu, small and bearded, playing with his dogs, sharing inspirational quotes, or advocating veganism. At his most vulgar, Negreanu promises to “kick butt and have fun.” While competitors play cowboys or entrepreneurs or loner-geniuses, Negreanu has the air of a beloved high school teacher.
When I first encountered Negreanu in a grainy YouTube video, he sat across a $46,000 pot from a meathead who had him dominated. Negreanu’s opponent, a textbook tool in mirrored Oakleys and backwards cap, had just landed a straight — five cards in numerical order. Negreanu had just two sevens.
Negreanu’s game is Texas hold ’em. Players have two cards that only they can see, plus five shared cards that come in three rounds: first, three cards (the “flop”); then a single card (the “turn”); and then one final card (the “river”). With each round, players bet depending on how strong they think their hand is. They can give up and fold if they have a weak hand. Or they can bluff — bet on a weak hand and try to force their opponents to fold better ones. Players strive to conceal their cards and guess their opponents’, and Negreanu has an uncanny knack for both: his unwavering chumminess makes it impossible to know when he has a good or bad hand, and he can read others with an accuracy that often seems superhuman.
“I had you, but then that card changed the leader, I’m pretty sure. Right?” said Negreanu, innocently, glancing at his opponent after the dealer laid down their fourth shared card.
“Couldn’t we use Daniel to track down Bin Laden?” said one of the commentators.
“You had some kind of nine,” Negreanu continued. “King-nine?”
Negreanu folded. The opponent examined his hand: king-nine. Against most other players, those cards would have earned him at least $10,000 more. Despite himself, the opponent laughed. Negreanu peeked over, then threw his hands in the air with a boyish chuckle.
“I did it again!” he said, and the crowd joined in, laughing and cheering. Re-watching the video, I also laugh, awed by this goofy clairvoyant and his mind-reading wizardry. I do not remember until much later that Negreanu lost tens of thousands of dollars on the hand.
His opponent grinned. “Even when you lose, they cheer for you.”
Though he makes it easy to forget, Negreanu is not a quirky hobbyist. He is a professional gambler, someone who marries mathematical brilliance with a psychopath’s zeal for manipulation. Negreanu has made a career separating people from their cash with practiced and elegant savagery, earning more than $40 million in professional tournament play alone. And that is in addition to sponsorships, a Masterclass video series, and his vast online presence. He often seems to take, rather than earn, money.
I have spent an embarrassing number of hours watching videos of Negreanu. Like many, I was first drawn to them for the payoff: he is one of the world’s greatest players, and he agrees to share all. But the promise of riches evaporates quickly; his techniques apply mostly to high stakes tournament play, which only the smallest fraction of viewers will experience. Yet I, and millions of others, keep watching. And we watch because the true appeal of these videos is him. Negreanu himself—bashful, talented, righteous; eager to lend his time and charm. It is pleasure to learn from him, to see him triumph over cold and abrasive foes, to lose with amiable grace, or just go about his day. Hour after hour, he is strange, and welcoming, and irresistible.
But the more I watch of Negreanu, the more I suspect that his allure goes beyond mere entertainment. A mantra in Negreanu’s videos is that “everything at the poker table conveys information,” and he embodies those words as if they were a religious creed. His face and hands are precise instruments for unraveling and deceiving his opponents, honed by thousands of hours at the poker table, and wielded by an all-seeing supercomputer of a mind. An opponent’s skewed glance, or the cadence of their breathing, or the way that they handle their chips—all these become evidence that can be leveraged for financial gain. Negreanu’s thrum of happy chatter makes people forget that they’re playing for millions; his grins, laughs and glances are precisely calibrated to deceive.
In a popular video series called “Hand Breakdowns,” Negreanu walks viewers through the strategy behind professional play, cutting between his face and recordings of poker games. In one episode, he observes three players sparring over a $176,000 pot, all three with strong hands. The flop brings two tens and a nine. Two players have tens in their hole cards, giving them three tens each. The other has two nines, giving him a full house — one pair plus three-of-a-kind — and the best hand. That player bets $40,000. The next player, Tom, matches (“calls”) the bet. The third player folds.
The video cuts to Negreanu’s face: “Notice the physical tells he gives off,” he says of the folding player, after which he mimics, flawlessly, the split second in which the player lays down his cards; the blink of the eyes, timed against a slowly taken breath, flowing into the soft flick with which he tosses his cards on the table. “This should alert Tom to the fact that he had a ten.” With a ten out of the deck, Negreanu is able to deduce every hand that Tom’s opponent could have, and calculate with near certainty that Tom is beat. That certainty is founded on little more than the lilt of a breath, and the cadence of hands and eyes. For Negreanu, the chatter of the subconscious is worth a fortune.
Because of clips like this, watching Negreanu has begun to make me paranoid. I fear that I am able to watch hours of an unassuming guy explain esoteric, math-heavy poker theory for the same reason that he can take millions in tournaments—because he is a master manipulator, doing to my attention the same thing that he does to his opponents’ chip stacks. The more I see of him, the less I can believe that anything he does — whether it be parsing his craft for all the internet to see, or wiping his nose — is spontaneous. Daniel Negreanu at the card table is the same Daniel Negreanu at home in a vlog. And when the immensity of his skill at manipulation and deception comes into focus, it becomes difficult to reconcile the two: one taking tens of thousands of dollars each night, and the other asking you to learn and have fun and look at his dogs. Just as he does at the card table, I find myself dissecting every move Negreanu makes — the way he scratches his beard, or takes a breath, or cracks a smile — for some sign of the gears churning underneath. Meanwhile, his viewership climbs, and ads for his sponsors and Masterclass roll by.
In truth, I doubt that Daniel Negreanu is a malevolent hustler. He donates much of his wealth to charity and is happily married; he is the sort of person who took a lunch that his mom had packed to high-stakes poker tournaments well after he had made his millions. The ease with which he robs me — not of my money, but of my time — fills me with uneasy thoughts about the online ecosystems where I encounter him. Like Negreanu at the card table, those YouTube queues and social media feeds ransack me by playing with the parts of my mind over which I have little control. Just as Negreanu can twist a breath or a laugh to lure in an opponent or thrill a viewer, algorithms keep me clicking with anesthetizing streams of gently perfect suggestions, draining my time while they mop up my monetized attention.
The comparison makes me think of the ways in which even the good of those sites — the promise of knowledge, or the opportunity for connection — is corrupted by their machinery; how, by making a commodity of my time and attention, even the noblest pursuit feeds an evil enterprise. Strapping in for a YouTube session is like playing poker with, or watching, Negreanu: even if my goal is to learn or to have fun, I am still being toyed with for someone else’s benefit; my private urges are made public and profitable. Both experiences bring with them the prickly feeling that someone is cheering for me, even when I lose.
