And the poker gods smiled upon him
With the year coming to a close, Poker Hall of Famer Daniel Negreanu has shared his tournament results, as he tends to do every year. Posting on Twitter, Negreanu disclosed that he bought in for a total of $3,224,564 and won $4,875,609, for a profit of $1,625,545.
That total earnings number came from 23 cashes in 107 events. He clarified upon questioning from a Twitter follower that by “events” he means actual events, not total number of entries. He does not have a figure for how many entries and re-entries he ponied up. Negreanu clearly focused on high roller events, as his average buy-in was over $30,000.
Negreanu also shared his profit/loss numbers for the last decade, which he says are based purely on results and do not include money made or lost from swaps, selling pieces of his action, or taxes.
A good decade overall
This was his third-best year since 2013. In that year, he profited $1,963,500, but it was 2014 during which he really made bank, ending $7,100,164 in the black. He said he achieved that outlier of a year by finishing second in the $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop at the World Series of Poker. Looking at his results on TheHendonMob.com, sure enough, he earned $8,288,001 in that tournament, which essentially accounts for his entire profit on the year.
Negreanu profited in most years in the past decade (he has no live tournament results from 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic). He had two sub-break even years, which unfortunately for him, came back-to-back in 2016 and 2017. In 2016, he lost a whopping $1,246,693 and followed that up with a much more manageable (for a high stakes poker player, that is) $86,140 loss in 2017.
One Twitter follower asked Negreanu if he usually sells large pieces of his action to backers. He said he does not and only sells pieces to fans at zero markup “because it’s a fun way to engage with people I think and they get free equity.”
There are always haters
Of course, even though Daniel Negreanu is being cool and offering up his financial stats for all to see, some people couldn’t help but “poopoo” his results. Poker pro Allen Kessler asked Negreanu what his results would have looked like without the “super high roller win.”
The tournament of which he is speaking is the $300,000 No-Limit Hold’em Super High Roller Bowl VII, which Negreanu won for a cash of $3,312,000. Kessler clearly knows the answer to his question: Daniel Negreanu would have ended up in the red – or at least a smaller profit, depending on his finish – if he didn’t have that victory.
But, as Negreanu responded, “So you want to just not count the one I won but count all the ones I didn’t?”
Kessler did back off of his perceived criticism a bit, saying, “It just shows how volatile a year could be,” and followed it up by pointed out other cashes Negreanu had that could have been better were it not for some luck. Negreanu gave another example of his own, concluding, “In the end, it’s all part of it and over time if you play well you will end up on the right side of it.”
Image credit: PokerGO.com