Daniel Negreanu Wins His First Major Online Poker Event
Daniel Negreanu is one of the most recognizable professional poker players in the industry. He’s been playing poker since he was 15, professionally since he was old enough to legally join a live table. His myriad accomplishments speak for themselves, including 5 WSOP bracelets, 2 WPT titles and more than $18 million in live tournament winning alone. The only thing Daniel ‘KidPoker’ Negreanu had yet to do in his long and illustrious career, short of winning the WSOP Championship, was to win a major online poker event.
The Canadian pro has been playing online poker virtually since the birth of the industry. He has logged into all of the major poker rooms at one point or another. Since June of 2007 (minus the Black Friday stint), Negreanu has restricted his online poker play to PokerStars, having signed on with the world’s largest poker site to represent them as a Team PokerStars Pro. Daniel makes a point to participate in as many major online PokerStars events as time permits, and although he has cashed in many of them, his persistence finally paid off with a 1st place win over the weekend.
KidPoker took a seat at Event #39-H (H=High Stakes version, as the poker site offers a Low, Medium and High level for all events) of the Pokertars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) on Saturday, May 25. A field of 180 players posted the $5,200 buy-in to participate in the high roller PLO event, guaranteeing a $400k prize pool. As is the norm at PokerStars, the turnout for the event was much higher than the guarantee anticipated, building a $900,000 pool to play for.
Negreanu wasn’t the only big-wig in the field, of course. Other poker pros in the mix included Justin Bonomo, Jason Mercier, Shaun Deeb, Isaac Haxton and more. The random shuffling system dealt the first hands at 11am, and by the time the field was whittled down to a final table that evening, KidPoker found himself as the chip leader with a stack of 331,441. One elimination after another led to a quick heads-up finale between Negreanu and Florian “FA_Morgoth” Langmann, a 29 year old poker pro from Austria, particularly famous for his continuous appearance on PokerStars’ nose-bleed $200/$400 PLO cash tables.
By this time, Daniel had built his stack up to a solid 764,712, while Langmann lagged far behind at 135,288. Needless to stay, it didn’t take long for KidPoker to extinguish what little flame FA_Morgoth had left in him. After just five hands – the last of which Negreanu flopped a Nut Straight – it was all over for the Austrian. Daniel quite literally “scooped” the final pot of the night, just 31 minutes into Sunday.
Soon after claiming his $216,000 first-place prize for winning the high-stakes SCOOP PLO event, Daniel Negreanu hopped over to his Twitter account and tapped out the following tweet: “Won my first ever major online poker tournament. This last two months has been the sickest run of my career. So thankful and SO FUN!”
Congratulation, Daniel, on your first major online poker tournament victory!