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Thoughts on Opening Hands of Negreanu Polk Grudge Match

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Polk Negeanu Grudge Match

In case you missed it, the long-awaited grudge match between Doug Polk and Daniel Negreanu kicked off on Wednesday. While much of the United States waited to see who will be the next President, the poker world tuned in for some fireworks – at least that’s what we expected.

We all came to a poker match looking for a fight, and we got a poker match. Today, I’ll give my opinions about the first 200 hands of this grudge match and what to expect from here.

Live Start Was Best Case Scenario for Negreanu

For those that weren’t already aware, the first 200 hands of this grudge match were played live at the PokerGo studios in Las Vegas rather than on WSOP.com. While the match was heads-up NL Hold’em, a live start was always going to favor Daniel Negreanu as he is more known for his live play and his ability to read his opponents.

What transpired was a nice solid win for Negreanu over the first 200 hands. He jumped into an early lead and held that lead almost the entire time. Polk held the lead briefly at the mid-way point, but Daniel used a combination of good luck and solid play to take a substantial lead.

The big key in this match is that Negreanu was able to bluff a bit better than Polk. Negreanu was able to run a massive bluff with K-9 on a jack-high board that forced Polk to fold A-Q. Later, Polk tried to bluff at the wrong time and ran into trips that effectively sent him to a $100k deficit.

In the end, Polk finished down $117k. This was not the start he wanted but is not exactly unexpected considering the match started off live. Now the match moves online, which is more of Polk’s forte. Don’t be surprised to see Polk whittle away at Negreanu’s lead from here.

Somebody Forgot What the Words Grudge Match Mean

When this grudge match was first announced, most of us didn’t know quite what to expect. Would we see constant smack talk between the two? Would Polk show up wearing a “More Rake is Better” shirt? Maybe Daniel would get to knock Polk’s teeth out. Anything could happen, right?

Check out the promo for the matchup posted by PokerGo on Tuesday:

I don’t think anyone saw what actually went down. The pair went to the tables and were civil, courteous, chatted a lot, and were downright gentlemanly. Whaaaaaa?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it is healthy going around espousing hate left and right. However, when you’ve been building up to a “grudge match” for years and it finally kicks off, you don’t expect the players to come across being buddy buddy.

The following tweet nicely sums up what we saw:

Was The Hate Merely Set Aside for TV?

The big question now is whether Polk and Negreanu are going to play the rest of the match civilly or if this was done merely to make TV that could be marketable. Don’t get me wrong, the non-Twitter obsessed poker fan will probably enjoy the match as it went down, but those of us that have waited weeks to see this were very disappointed.

Personally, I will not be surprised to see the online sessions to degenerate into what we’ve seen from the pair in the past. Since both players will be playing to their fan base rather than a TV audience, we will see more of their personalities.

So if you missed the first 200 hands, you really didn’t miss anything outside of Polk dropping a couple of buy-ins. There’s still at least 12,300 hands left in this match, assuming it is called early. A lot can happen, and the best is yet to come – at least we hope.

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