Looking for a Poker Coach? How About Daniel Negreanu?
If you could pick one current professional poker player as your "poker coach" — someone to teach you strategy and other ways to improve your game — who would you choose?
Today's start of the €1,000,000 buy-in Monte-Carlo One Drop Extravaganza (with unlimited reentries until the end of Day 1) has inspired just such a question. The biggest buy-in poker tournament of all-time is being staged strictly for recreational players and by invitation only, meaning the field is made up of businessmen, entrepreneurs, and others who have made their money through means other than poker.
Many of those participating have hired coaches to help them this weekend, and given the players' deep pockets one assumes they can pick just about anyone they want. Earlier this month we learned who Guy Laliberté, founder of the One Drop charity and organizer of the event had picked.
I will be attending One Drop playing coach to the man himself: Guy Laliberte. Coaching venue is his yacht in the south of France next week.
— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker)
You couldn't do much better than to have the all-time leader in tournament earnings and Poker Hall of Famer Daniel Negreanu providing you strategy advice. In fact, in the eyes of many — including Jesse May — Negreanu might well be the first name to spring to mind when answering the question above.
How much can a poker player improve in a week? If @RealKidPoker is your teacher, there’s an upper limit of sky high.
— Jesse May (@ScurrilousMay)
Thankfully for those of us without the funds to enter €1,000,000 tournaments or to hire "Kid Poker" as a coach, Negreanu has offered quite a lot of free instruction to those willing to seek it out.
Just last week Negreanu and his fellow Team PokerStars Pro Jason Somerville appeared on the latter's Twitch channel for a nearly four-hour session reviewing the final table of Negreanu's recent victory in the $2,100 H.O.R.S.E. event in the 2016 World Championship of Online Poker.
The stream featured detailed instruction of all of the H.O.R.S.E. variants — limit hold'em, limit Omaha hi/low, razz, seven-card stud, and seven-card stud hi/low — with tons of additional advice about tournament strategy and reading opponents. You can check it out below:
Negreanu has also recently offered strategy advice in other venues, such as during a Q&A session at the European Poker Tour Barcelona festival where he took questions on a variety of poker-related topics.
Among the questions Negreanu was asked was one regarding the relative value of being tight or aggressive — which is better?
"When people ask me how I'm going to play today, I'm like 'I have no idea,'" Negreanu begins, then adds how the styles of his opponents have a lot to do how tight or aggressive he ends up playing.
He then delves a little into an assumption that lies behind the question. Take a look:
Other questions were a little more specific, such as this one: "How often do you four-bet out of position?"
If you're at all familiar with Negreanu's favored "small ball" style, you might anticipate his response:
Negreanu isn't only a great poker player, but also especially good at communicating ideas and concepts to others regardless of their skill level — just one of many reasons why he would make a good answer to the question of who to pick as your poker coach.
Be sure to stick with PokerNews today and throughout the weekend to follow live updates from the Monte-Carlo One Drop Extravaganza and see how well Laliberté puts Negreanu's advice to use and how the others perform.
