PokerStars has been in the shark-hunting business since the site first opened back in 2001, but it landed its biggest catch yet at the beginning of June when it hooked Daniel Negreanu and fitted him for a Team PokerStars jersey. He is a great addition to a group that already includes three of the last four
World Series of Poker champions, and PokerStars couldn't be happier to have Negreanu join the team.
There's a reason the folks at PokerStars are so pleased to land a player with so much charisma and personality that the Amazon Room, the cavernous conference room in the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino that once a year is turned into the mecca of poker, sometimes seems small when he walks in.
First, there are Negreanu's many defining poker career moments: He's cashed for more than $10 million in tournaments; he holds three
WSOP bracelets and two
World Poker Tour titles; he's won both the
Card Player Player of the Year award and the
WSOP Player of the Year award in 2004; he plays at the pinnacle of cash games with the most accomplished players in the world, and lets everyone watch on
High Stakes Poker.
Then, there's this moment: One afternoon during the first week of this year's
WSOP, a fan who was a wild-eyed tourist personified caught Negreanu in the hallway just outside the Amazon Room. This was an excited man. Picture Chris Farley and Richard Brodie's love child. He nearly did a back flip when he saw that it was Negreanu whom he nearly ran over.
Instead of running for the nearest exit, Negreanu stopped and spent time chatting with the guy, pounding fists and lighting the hallway up with the sound of his laughter. After a few minutes, the man's wife snapped a picture of the two and then Negreanu disappeared into the crowd.
After Negreanu was gone, the man literally jumped up and down while dialing a friend on his cellphone. When the call connected, he shouted: "Guess who I just met? Daniel Negreanu!" Both wife and awe-struck husband were smiling ear to ear at the chance encounter. The way that Negreanu acted toward the couple clearly made their day and possibly their trip to Vegas.
That, in a nutshell, is why PokerStars is so happy to have Negreanu join its team of poker players.
PokerStars
So far, 2007 has been a phenomenal year for PokerStars, which has grown into the world's premier poker site in only six years. In May, the online site celebrated dealing its 10-billionth hand by giving away $100,000 to a 19-year-old student from Canada who was playing at the 1¢-2¢ table that happened to be the one where the milestone hand was dealt.
That same weekend, PokerStars broke every poker tournament record in the book when 10,894 players participated in the weekly
Sunday Million event, to which PokerStars added $250,000 in celebration of the 10-billionth hand. It was the largest poker tournament in world history, and the timing was perfect. The 10-billionth hand had just hit a day before, and the site was buzzing with excitement the entire weekend.
It took PokerStars more than five years to reach the 5-billionth-hand mark. A little more than a year later, the site had dealt another 5 billion hands. PokerStars often has more than 100,000 players playing on its site at once, and the company believes that Negreanu will help bring even more players to the site, which already has 9 million registered.
"It's perfect," Negreanu said. "It's a great opportunity for me and for all of the players at Full Contact Poker, really. I've always had a pretty good relationship with PokerStars. It's probably the first site I really played any poker at."
One reason a PokerStars official gave for pursuing Negreanu shows what the world thinks of this 32-year-old, skinny Canadian poker player who just happens to be one of the best around. Before pursuing Negreanu, PokerStars performed marketing surveys in the countries in which it has a customer base but would like to see expansion. Using a word of a company official, the results were "shocking."
All around the globe, people recognize Negreanu, and they like and respect him. He's a marketing team's dream, and will be used in many ways, including TV commercials in places like Canada and Germany, and repeated appearances on the
European Poker Tour - of which PokerStars is the main sponsor.
PokerStars also landed one of the coolest poker promotions on the Internet. Negreanu's
Protégé promotion, which originated on Negreanu's Full Contact Poker, is following him over to PokerStars. Players compete for a prize package that includes entry into a handful of major tournaments and several months of having Negreanu as a poker mentor.
The promotion is not the only thing that Negreanu will bring from Full Contact Poker, which stopped running poker games the same day that Negreanu announced that he had signed with PokerStars. The site also got all of Full Contact Poker's player accounts in the deal.
Full Contact Poker still exists, but it's making a transition to a poker school featuring Negreanu. His blogs and the popular user forum there will remain.
He said that he's excited about the opportunities to work with such a big company, specifically the marketing efforts that he will be part of in Canada, his native country.
"Obviously, I'll be making a few more trips abroad. With advertising being a little easier in Canada and Europe, I'll probably be spending a little more time on the
EPT, and spending a lot more time doing really fun stuff in Canada with some of the promotions that PokerStars has going on there," Negreanu said. "I have some really cool ideas and I'm really excited about some of the things in Canada that they're going to do."
All online poker players know that PokerStars is doing extremely well. As one of the only sites that still remains open to U.S. customers, it's now the 800-pound gorilla of all of the world's poker sites. A company official with whom
Card Player spoke about Negreanu's addition to Team PokerStars said that the last eight months have been a "roller coaster" for the site, and despite all of the milestones already reached this year, everyone at PokerStars maintains a certain perspective.
"We've been doing well and we try to keep everything in perspective as far as our players are concerned. We're breaking records because we offer our players more than anyone else. We give a lot back because we appreciate the people choosing us," the official said. "From a marketing standpoint, we try to come up with plans to make the players happy. We're not just trying to get players or suck up market share at this time. We're really trying to do what's best for the people."
It's obvious that Negreanu will be found playing in the games at PokerStars. Of course, he's going to be found playing in the biggest games on the site with his buddy Barry Greenstein, but he said he'll also be playing in many of the low-stakes pot-limit and no-limit games at PokerStars.
"You'll see me playing 50¢-$1 pot-limit Omaha, raising literally every hand," Negreanu said, "because, actually, a lot of what I do and a lot of the theories I create with my poker thinking are based on what I call doing the 'nut bar' thing. I'll play small limits and sort of experiment."
He said that this should be fun for the players who are playing at these levels, for two reasons. One, they get to play with Daniel Negreanu, poker champion. And, two, often these theories are truly nut bar and fail miserably. People who would never be able to say they won a dime from Negreanu will end up doing just that. And they'll tell their friends, and that's great for PokerStars. As for Negreanu, don't worry - he can afford it.
And although Negreanu is now an ambassador for the site, his affection for PokerStars seems genuine. He says he loves how PokerStars does business and how it treats its customers. He loves how many choices are available to poker players at the site. He loves that PokerStars knows that the customers make the site great and how the company works to thank them. Finally, before having to run back to the Amazon Room for a shot at another
WSOP bracelet, he shared one last story about PokerStars that happened when the site first started.
Negreanu was playing in a $100-$200 hold'em game when PokerStars made what Negreanu called "an unbelievable gesture, and it flows with the way that I like to do business."
He said that while he was in the game, a moderator popped up in the chat box and asked all of the players at the table if they were hungry and would like a pizza delivered to their homes.
"I was like, 'Are you kidding me? All right, sure, send me a pizza.' And 30 minutes later, I had pizza at my door, courtesy of PokerStars," Negreanu said. "That's just so in line with something that I would like to do, and it just shows appreciation. I thought that was really unique, and I've been really impressed, frankly, with the way they've done things since then."
You can find Daniel playing as KidPoker at PokerStars.com.
The 'PokerStars'
PokerStars has 19 professional players on its team, including four former
World Series of Poker champions: Tom McEvoy (1983), Chris Moneymaker (2003), Greg Raymer (2004), and Joe Hachem (2005). All of the players are accomplished pros, including William Chen, Victor Ramdin, Isabelle Mercier, Steve Paul-Ambrose, John Duthie, Wil Wheaton, Vanessa "Lady Maverick" Rousso, Luca Pagano, Bertrand Grospellier, Lee "Final Table" Nelson, Noah Boeken, and Katja Thater. They hail from all around the world, and are used as the face of PokerStars in their home countries as well as abroad.
Chris Moneymaker
The man with the golden name put Internet poker directly in the spotlight when he won the
WSOP main event after qualifying for it on PokerStars for a measly $39. He won $2.5 million and planted the dream of poker riches deep in the brains of thousands of people. Moneymaker has won $268,000 since the 2003
WSOP, but it's the one tournament, where he beat Sammy Farha heads up, that cemented his place in poker history as the man who showed how the nearly impossible could be done.
Greg "Fossilman" Raymer
Raymer is a former patent attorney who helped make 2004 a great year for PokerStars. For the second year in a row, the winner of the
WSOP main event got in for much less than the $10,000 buy-in by qualifying on PokerStars. Raymer got in it by winning a $160 shootout. Then, he blasted through a field of 2,576 players to win $5 million, the championship, and a life dedicated to poker. The next year, he pulled off what some poker players and fans believe is the most astounding accomplishment in
WSOP history when he nearly won the main event again. He ended up finishing 25th in the event that attracted 5,619 players. Fellow Team PokerStars member Joe Hachem won it.
Joe Hachem
Hachem won the
WSOP championship in 2004, but he did not qualify for the main event through PokerStars. The online site scooped him up soon after he won the event and its $7.5 million prize. Since then, he has won more than $2.76 million playing tournament poker, most of which came from his December victory in the
World Poker Tour Five-Diamond World Poker Classic.
Barry Greenstein
Greenstein is a two-time
WPT event winner and owns two
WSOP bracelets. He's cashed in 11
WPT events and made four final tables. In the
WSOP, he's cashed in more than 20 events, and the money he wins on the tournament circuit goes to charity. Like many of the top players, playing high-stakes cash games is where Greenstein excels. A regular in the largest buy-in games in the country, he's won millions playing poker.
He's also the author of the fantastic poker book
Ace on the River, and always carries a copy of one with him when he plays. If and when he gets knocked out of a tournament, he signs a copy, including how the hand played out, and gives it to the player who did the dirty deed.
Humberto Brenes
How do you say shark in Spanish? Why, it's Humberto, of course. The Costa Rican poker star has been playing tournament poker for years, and his first major cash came in the 1987
WSOP main event, when he finished 14th. It paid only $12,500. He owns two
WSOP bracelets, and in 2006, he cashed in eight
WSOP events, tying Phil Hellmuth's record for single
WSOP cashes. With Latin America considered to be another untapped online poker market, Brenes is an important member of Team PokerStars. He's also one of the most entertaining players to watch, and often breaks out into song at the table and is rarely without a smile.
