PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker have been rivals for a long time and despite the fact that they are now owned by the same company, they continue to battle it out for online poker supremacy (we don’t think PokerStars will lose that battle any time soon). Now it looks like it might be time for a rivalry to get started between the pros on both sites.
Team PokerStars pro Daniel Negreanu and Gus Hansen, founding member of Full Tilt’s “Professionals,” got into it a bit on Twitter over the past week. It started on February 21st when Hansen needled Negreanu, reminding him of a gigantic hand between the two on a 2006 episode of “High Stakes Poker.” In the hand, Negreanu flopped a set of Sixes while Hansen flopped a set of Fives. Hansen’s hit his one-outer on the turn and made Quads, while Negreanu ended up with a full house on the river. Hansen moved all-in after that final card and feeling something was amiss, Negreanu went into the tank. He eventually called and looked devastated when Hansen showed him the business. The pot was worth $575,700.
Negreanu responded to the tweet with, “@GusHansen I was going to congratulate you on your graph for 2013 but then realized I was looking at it upside down. Ouch!”
Later, Hansen challenged Negreanu to a “High Stakes Poker” rematch on Full Tilt, to which Negreanu replied, “@GusHansen I just may have an interesting idea for you. Will get back to you Monday sir…”
He did, in fact, get back to Hansen Monday, tweeting a link to a video blog. In the blog, Negreanu proposes a PokerStars versus Full Tilt challenge. It would be Hansen and his two “Professionals” partners, Viktor “Isildur1” Blom and Tom “durrrr” Dwan against Negreanu and two members of Team PokerStars, whom Negreanu would select. One member of each team would face off against each other in a “battleship” style heads-up match at the upcoming European Poker Tour London stop (battleship style is when two players compete in-person, yet online with the monitors of their laptops back-to-back). Each match would be best-of-three, with the winning team being the one that won at least two of the three match-ups.
Today, Hansen responded in the affirmative, saying, “If you and your money will be there, I can’t say no!”
He did suggest one change, though: “Since you have tons of PS pros to choose from, and I have my two, I should get to pick the match ups.” Negreanu accepted the request and said he would have his team selected in a few days.
In his video, Negreanu said he is thinking of five players – Vanessa Selbst, Jason Mercier, Eugene Katchalov, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, and Isaac Haxton – though he is taking suggestions from fans.
No specific stakes were discussed publicly, so it remains to be seen if Daniel Negreanu will have a chance to win back the money he lost on the tremendously unlucky hand seven years ago.
