One year removed from a rough summer, Daniel Negreanu is fighting his way back to within striking distance in the Player of the Year race — sort of — and he’s doing so with large field event success.
At the 2022 World Series of Poker (WSOP), the Poker Hall of Famer lost $1.1 million and was never in contention for Player of the Year. He isn’t really in contention yet this year, but he isn’t too far off from getting to that point.
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Is the Poker Legend Heading in the Right Direction?
Negreanu is currently deep in Event #34: $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha with one of the top stacks. The tournament started with 1,355 entrants and he’s already wrapped up his sixth cash of the summer.
His past four cashes have all come in events with over 1,000 players, including a 99th place finish for $2,773 in the $300 Gladiators of Poker, which had 23,088 entrants, second most in live tournament history.
For “DNegs” to work his way into Player of the Year contention in the PLO event he’s currently competing in, he’d need a top five finish. Even with that, he’d still be in quite a deep hole compared to the top performers Jason Simon and Chad Eveslage. But a few more deep runs in the next couple weeks would change that, if he can reach the PLO final table.
Negreanu won POY in 2004 and 2013, the last year he won a bracelet, and momentarily won it in 2019 before the WSOP caught a scoring error and determined Robert Campbell was the true winner.
There’s no doubt that Negreanu’s summer has been ho-hum thus far, but he is quietly having some success in small field events. It could be his ticket to profitability at the 2023 WSOP and also to get back into the Player of the Year race.
Entering Day 17 of the series, Negreanu is down just over $400,000 overall. If he were to take down the $1,500 PLO tournament, he’d erase about 75% of that deficit — first place pays $298,192. A cash on top of that in the $250,000 Super High Roller, which kicks off Friday, would put him in the black.
The summer is still young. We still haven’t reached the midway point at the 2023 WSOP and won’t do so until early next week. For Negreanu, he has yet to bring value to Team Noori in the WSOP $25k Fantasy Draft given only Shaun Deeb received a higher bid. But if can reach Friday’s final table, it could be the start of what turns out to be a great summer for the GGPoker ambassador.
At the time of publishing, with 45 players remaining, Negreanu was one of 11 players above 1 million in chips. Josh Arieh, Robert Mizrachi, and John Racener are also among those still competing for the bracelet.
Follow Negreanu’s Run in the $1,500 PLO Tournament