Deal Me In with Daniel Negreanu

Deal Me In with Daniel Negreanu

Here’s another excerpt from my new book, Deal Me In, written by my friend and perennial fan-favorite poker professional, Daniel Negreanu. I hope you enjoy it:

I can remember going to the mall in Toronto with my brother and parents and just staring at people. I guess all kids do that, but there was more to it for me than just staring at things that were new to me. I was, at just five years old, trying to figure people out. I was a people watcher then and I’m a people watcher to this day.

I still do that sort of thing when I go to the mall. I can’t help myself, I’ve always been intrigued by people and want to know what makes them tick. It just so happens that doing that kind of thing is excellent training for the poker table.

My affinity for people, numbers, and competition eventually brought me into poker. I’d never played the game as a kid; my first taste of poker was through my buddies at the pool hall. One night after a snooker tournament, I got invited to a house game. They were playing all kinds of crazy wild card games like Kings and Little Ones, Follow the Queen, In Between and 7/27.  

It didn’t take long before I lost my $10 and ended up chilling on the couch, just hanging out. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.  

There was one guy in the game, an Asian kid named John Seto, who seemed to win almost every night. I’d watch him and he’d just sit there the whole night and maybe play four or five hands and that’s it.

I thought, how can you win if you don’t play?

Well, I learned my first valuable lesson from Seto: Don’t play if you don’t have the best of it. Be patient and wait for good hands.

When I turned twenty-one, there was only one place I wanted to be: Las Vegas. I’d planned on going there in 1996 to become the youngest ever WSOP champion. My first problem was that I didn’t have the $10,000 buy-in so I played in a super-satellite.

The satellite gave away eleven seats to the Main Event, and with 13 players left, I was looking good. A player went all-in, then I went all-in with pocket aces, and then another player called with A-K.

A-A against J-J and A-K! I was on my way to the Big Dance!

Nope, the first card I saw was a jack. I was devastated. Playing in the WSOP just wasn’t going to happen for me. Huck Seed won it that year and I couldn’t even bear to watch. I wanted to be in the event, not a spectator.

By late-2003, I had it all figured out. I realized not only that I should have more money but that I needed to get my priorities in order and stop being a screw-up.

The timing was pretty good. In 2004 I tore up the tournament scene, putting together a year that will be tough to duplicate. At the WSOP, I won my third bracelet and Player of the Year honors. Immediately after, I won the $10,000 buy-in event at the Sands against one of the toughest fields I’d ever faced. Later in the year, I won the $10,000 WPT event at the Borgata, and then did it again in December, winning the $15,000 WPT event at the Bellagio.

I’d like to be remembered as a guy who put the best interests of the game before my own and as a guy who obviously had a lot of fun at the poker table.

The rest of Daniel Negreanu's story, plus many others, are in Deal Me In, the new book by Phil Hellmuth, available at www.pokerbrat.com.