A few months ago, I played in a FPP satellite for the huge PokerStars Sunday tournament. I didn't win a ticket, but I did make a new acquaintance in Ed Brayton, a hell of a poker player, and a freelance writer who pens the absolutely brilliant Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog.Ed mostly writes about science, religion, and where they intersect (and when they shouldn't) but he also writes about poker, leading to this gem from last week.
For those of you who aren't up to speed on this: Daniel Negreanu loudly (and, in my opinion, quite ignorantly) criticized Greg Raymer and other players who brought a lawsuit against the World Poker Tour last year, and the resulting kerfuffle took on a life of its own on 2+2, Daniel's Full Contact Poker Forum, and on a small yacht in the Indian Ocean, where two brothers randomly chose the topic as the one thing they were going to fight to the death about to settle the question, once and for all, "Whose is bigger?"
Things seemed to settle down until recently, after Joe Hachem crushered Daniel at Bellagio, and Daniel praised Joe for being a real good tournament player (duh) but also took a pretty nasty swipe at Greg, comparing him to Jamie Gold and Chris Moneymaker as guys who just got lucky. Oh, you di-int!
Yeah, he did, apparently ignoring Greg's impressive tournament record after he won the 2004 WSOP Main Event, which included finishing 19th in 2005, against a field of
Now, Daniel has always been a good guy to me, and I genuinely like him, but this is just silly. I don't think he really believes it either; he's talking about Main Event champions who didn't repeat or do much after winning their bracelet, and Varkonyi is conspicuously absent.
Click over to Ed's blog, and take a look at Greg's response to Daniel's barb. It's classic.
1. I've always liked Negreanu, but I think he goes a little far here. Yes, Raymer may not be correct in his assessment of the 4000/8000 games, but to call Raymer a flash in the pan and equate him with Gold in particular is absurd and quite the insult. Raymer does have his tournament weaknesses (I watched him bust out of the PPT Foxwoods tournament after flopping TP weak kicker with Q8 and just couldn't get away from it against one of the European players who had flopped a set of Hiltons), but Daniel has his own issues with not always being able to get away from hands, especially when he's playing marginal cards preflop. I guess when these kinds of $$$ amounts and egos are involved, there will always be the "mine's bigger" arguments. I had always just figured that Daniel was a better guy than that.
Posted at 11:45AM on Jan 8th 2007 by iamhoff