When Daniel Negreanuaccepted a challenge to play two tables of $200-$400 heads-up no-limit hold’em against Doug Polk for 25,000 hands, Polk trolled Negreanu by referring to himself as a truck driver and that he was coming into the match with the intention of backing up the truck and driving away with all the money.

1. Negreanu Poker Master Class
2. Negreanu Poker
3. Negreanu Poker Player

Eventually, Polk ditched the truck driver schtick, but he did end up winning a ton of money as the duo completed the challenge Wednesday evening with a marathon session. Over 1,712 hands and more than six hours of heads-up poker, Polk won $255,722 and netted a win of more than $1.2 million for the entire challenge.

“Congratulations to Doug,” said Negreanu after the match in a post-game interview on the GGPoker YouTube channel. “He’s a great player and obviously the favorite going in. It was a fun challenge. I felt like there were ebbs and flows, of course, in terms of how I felt about it. He’s happy, obviously. He’s the big winner on the match, deservedly so. He played well.”

Negreanu slammed the last $25K in and Polk snapped with for trips, revealing Negreanu's bluff. Negreanu got a big chunk back when he three-bet jacks, faced a four-bet and got it all in for about $52K.

Following some shenanigans last week where Polk using a strategy that involved limping a ton of hands on the button, which Negreanu countered by excessively tanking, there were only 3,694 hands remaining in the challenge. On Wednesday afternoon, Negreanu said that the challenge was “likely to finish Friday unless we are feeling spicy and looking to gamboooool!”

The long-simmering tension between live poker professionals and their online counterparts has exploded into one of the biggest one-on-one card showdowns in the history of the game. Daniel Negreanu. Negreanu checked again and Polk went for almost a pot size bet again with $35,426. After Negreanu called, Polk raked in a $108,467 pot. Kid Poker experienced quite a tough cooler. 3 – Negreanu battles back. 11 in session 19, Negreanu gained back some of his losses. One notable hand made for a six-figure swing. Negreanu had been rolling. In our last update, Polk was leading by about $75,000 after six sessions. Despite his current lead, however, it hasn’t been all bad for Negreanu. The Poker Hall of Famer had a massive Session 7, winning $222,832.70 over 591 hands. The latest tweets from @realkidpoker.

The spice was clearly there and the pair decided to play long enough to end it. Polk came into the final two sessions with a nearly insurmountable lead of $736,804 and extended it by winning $209,281 on Monday.

Negreanu opened up a six-figure lead in Wednesday’s final session, but ultimately the tides turned and Polk won the four buy-ins back from the six-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner to get unstuck on the day and proceeded to win more than six buy-ins after that. Polk was on the right end of several coolers including a preflop all in with both players holding A-K. But a runout that contained for spades gave Polk the nut flush and a huge pot.

“The key about massive hands, right?” said Negreanu. “Step 1 is get one. And step 2 is have your opponent have something so strong that you’re going to get all the money.”

It takes some good fortune to go on a 10 buy-in upswing over the course of a six-hour session, but Polk said he was proud of the work that he put into getting back into the swing of heads-up no-limit hold ’em, a game he was once considered the best in the world at.

“I’m very happy that I spent so much time preparing and it really ended up helping me tremendously,” said Polk in a post-game interview of his with Nick Schulman and Jaime Kerstetter on his own YouTube channel. “And that I got to execute at such a high level over such a long period of time.”

Polk went on to thank a slew of people that he had in his corner throughout the whole match.

The three-time WSOP bracelet winner said that he was working with a few people from a general coaching perspective that helped him lock down his approach to the game, another handful of poker players that helped him implement preflop ranges to coincide with Negreanu’s different raise sizes, as well as a large group of members from his own training site, Upswing Poker, that tracked the action of every hand played, which was then inputted into multiple spreadsheets.

And from Negreanu’s point of view, the team kept Polk ahead of the curve.

“Every Monday he came back prepared,” said Negreanu. “He seemed to make some adjustments because there were always holes that we were looking to exploit. There were definitely some. Then when he would sort of get hammered in that spot, he’d go into the lab, come out of the weekend and okay, that hole is no longer valid.”

The match was inspired thanks to the rocky personal history that they have with one another with some intense needling back-and-forth on social media. By the end of the match, however, the two seemingly developed a mutual respect for one another, even swapping hand histories the night before the final battle.

Tuesday study session for the finale working with @DougPolkVids going over all the hands we played and sharing war stories.
Weird.

— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) February 2, 2021

Polk came into the match as the betting favorite. By the end of the match, however, he was impressed by the strides Negreanu had made to his game.

“He did a really impressive job with a lot of the stuff he did,” said Polk. “I did not think he would play this well at all… By the end, he was doing so many sharp things.”

In Polk’s opinion, Negreanu had become so proficient at the game that there weren’t many poker players that could beat him at the format. An impressive feat seeing that Negreanu had very little experience playing heads-up no-limit cash games before taking on Polk.

Negreanu Poker Master Class

“If you’re not a heads-up pro, he’s going to beat you,” said Polk about Negreanu. “He’s going to beat you. You’re not going to know as much as him. He will have better sizes, better ranges, better strategies. He just will understand the game better. Outside of the class of high-stakes heads-up pros, Negreanu is going to be one of the best players in the world.”

Outside of the seven figures, Polk also won a sizable amount in side action that was on the match. It was rumored that Bill Perkins had one of the largest bets against Polk and based on a Wednesday night tweet, it appears that he definitely lost some cash, albeit an unknown amount.

Read your friking messages or I'm paying VanessaSelbst instead of you!!!!

— Bill Perkins (Guy) (@bp22) February 4, 2021

Negreanu Poker

The Negreanu vs. Polk High Stakes Feud is slowly entering its final stages, with about five thousand hands left to play.

Having a substantial lead of over $700K over DNegs and with an unspecified (but likely significant) amount riding on the side bets, Polk has switched his button strategy to include some limps in his range.

Negreanu, who has a lot of catching up to do in terms of buy-ins, was not happy to see this new approach that aims to lower variance. So, in response, he decided to slow down the play speed by stalling.

During the latest session on January 27, Negreanu took 20 seconds on pretty much every decision, no matter how small or irrelevant.

Negreanu Poker Player

Frustrated, Polk asked Phil Galfond, who both players agreed upon as the arbitrator, to chime in and make the ruling.

Unfortunately for Doug, Galfond could not do much, as players did not cover this type of scenario in their pre-match arrangement, so Daniel was allowed to continue, if he so chose.

The two returned to the match and, eventually, Polk decided to abandon the limp strategy, and came back to his earlier raise or fold approach.

While Negreanu thinks he is in the right to use the time allotted by WSOP.com in any way he sees fit, which he technically is, the situation divided the poker community, as many found Canadian’s actions to be against the spirit of the challenge.

On the other hand, Negreanu seems to have gotten what he wanted, as Polk announced he would give up on limping buttons as he is looking to wrap up the match as soon as possible, which will be hard to do if they only get to play 100 to 200 hands per session.