Deputy Editor
There is some reentry shaming going on in poker right now, and I’m not here for it.
Seemingly every poker media outlet is running stories about how many times Daniel Negreanu has bought into the WSOP Paradise $26,000 Super Main Event. The coverage has gotten to the point where Negreanu apparently felt the need to defend himself, briefly ranting to a Poker Org social videographer.
“Everyone writes about how, like, I’m in for eight bullets, right?” he said. “Everyone I ask [is in for] eight, eight, seven, seven. But I’m the bad guy, right?”
I don’t think Negreanu’s the bad guy. I don’t think anyone who pumps as many bullets as they feel acceptable in a tournament is a bad guy.
Hell, I’ve been there. I once fired 12 into a $400 WSOP Circuit multi-flight in Hammond. Not one of my finer days on the poker felt. Trust me when I say, the majority of the time people do this, we don’t walk away feeling great about it. Most often, our opponents are the ones who wind up reaping the benefits.
And at the end of the day, Negreanu is just taking advantage of a combination of his bottomless bankroll plus a poorly structured reentry system. Not only do I think the bullet shaming is out of line, I think it’s poorly directed.
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Negreanu Didn’t Make the Rules, He’s Just Playing by Them
Negreanu, like countless other pros, has accepted the modern reality of tournament poker structures. They often leave registration open too long and allow unlimited bullets, leading to some occasionally eye-opening stacks of registration receipts.
It wasn’t always this way for “Kid Poker.” Back in the day, he was on the record that allowing unlimited reentries (and, before that, rebuys) was bad for the game, even if it benefited the deepest-pocketed players in the field, such as himself.
“The whole goal is to play, like, a high-variance style in order to get some chips,” he said in a recent vlog. “And when you run into it, it doesn’t work.”
Negreanu cited hands like A-4 suited, A-5 suited, and small pocket pairs as holdings he was trying to gamble with.
If you’re in there for one bullet, and you’re taking your only shot in an event like this, don’t you want to be all in against these sorts of hands when you have a big one? Yeah, you might take a bad beat and be quickly busted by a worse hand, but that’s how poker goes sometimes.
Players who pump entries in and gamble with mediocre holdings are implicitly giving their opponents the best of it more often than they would in a freezeout. Yes, someone is likely to be the unlucky person whose kings eventually lose to Negreanu’s A-5. If you can’t accept that risk, then tournament poker isn’t for you.
Ambassadors Pumping Money into Company Events is Normal Behavior
Some of the discourse around Negreanu’s reentries has revolved around the optics of a GGPoker ambassador “artificially” pumping the prize pool for a GG-backed event (GGPoker owns the WSOP). Especially so when that event has a record-breaking guarantee of $60 million, following a year in which it missed the $50 million guarantee.
First off, GGPoker, not Daniel Negreanu or any number of other blasters filling the event with reentries, successfully put its thumb on the scale with a revised buy-in structure, among other maneuvers to ensure hitting the guarantee. PokerScout covered the changes here. The cliffs are that registration is open longer, reentries were expanded from one per flight to unlimited, and Day 2 eliminations in the money provided even more reentry opportunities. The WSOP also added a second Day 2.
At the time of writing, with registration (finally) set to close, the prize pool has surpassed $70 million, according to live coverage provider PokerNews. If Negreanu wound up on eight bullets, he accounted for less than one-third of 1% of that total.
Even if Negreanu accounted for 30 bullets, he’s not acting much differently than many other site ambassadors. Sponsored pros have been splashing around in their sites’ events for years.
Newly sponsored pro Nik Airball has been doing his best to torch off some stacks in the $10-$20 pot-limit Omaha tables on CoinPoker. I’ve seen some of his hand histories, and trust me, the regulars are welcoming his action. My PLO cash is a little rusty, but I’m fairly certain opening under the gun and four-betting Q-9-8-6 single-suited is a losing proposition long-term.
And what’s wrong with Airball giving that sort of action? The guy regularly plays six-figure cash games. He can afford to punt off a few $2,000 stacks. He gets to gamble it up, the regulars get loose action, and CoinPoker gets to advertise the wild games they host. Everybody wins.
Players are Voting With Their Wallets
When it comes down to it, the operators respond to market behavior and then make decisions accordingly. If players stopped attending events with unlimited reentry or stopped reentering multiple times themselves, such events would go away.
Quite the opposite is happening, though, as one can see in the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event numbers.
It’s important to remember that players had choices this December. Two concurrent poker series with prestigious branding directly competed with WSOP Paradise.
I’ve attended European Poker Tour Prague, World Poker Tour World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas, and several events in the Bahamas. And I can tell you without hesitation that WSOP Paradise would be my last choice, even if I had an unlimited bankroll.
I’m going to get on my soapbox for a second and say that the Bahamas has the worst location, worst food, least value for the money, and worst main event structure of any of those events. It’s also harder to get to than the Wynn for most American players, and certainly harder than Prague for most Europeans. I’m not a fan of the Bahamas, and I’m not a fan of the changes to the structure. I think it was a cheap way to goose the numbers at the expense of the players’ bankrolls.
But players either don’t agree with me or don’t care. The allure of the absurd $60 million guarantee at WSOP Paradise might simply outweigh everything.
And that’s fine. Players should vote with their wallets. And right now, they’re voting for unlimited reentries. That guarantee was never going to be a thing without it.
So let Daniel Negreanu blast away in peace. He can afford it, he’s making his employer happy, and the player population is largely saying they support the structure that allows it.
If you want to dump on someone, dump on GGPoker. But they probably can’t hear you over the whir of the money-counting machines.
