Earlier this week Daniel Negreanu sat down for an interview with the website pokerplayer.co.uk, who somehow always manages to bring out the best and most controversial remarks in Daniel –you may recall it was the same outlet that Negreanu infamously referred to Annie Duke as a C***in a prior interview.

This time around the line of questioning focused on the current state of poker, and how Negreanu feels the game has changed over the past decade. Even though it’s hard to find a poker player who has done better for themselves financially during the poker boom, Negreanu still had plenty of reasons for being pessimistic about the current world of professional poker, from both the live and online arenas.

Negreanu first detailed his trials as an online poker beginning in 2010 where he admittedly “sucked”, but just weeks later, after seeking out advice and counsel from players like Lex Veldhuis, Tom Marchese, William Reynolds, and Richard Lyndacker, the waiting lists for games he was sitting in disappeared.

Perhaps the most controversial line in the entire interview was Negreanu’s feeling that had he remained focused on poker throughout the boom he would be as good as Phil Ivey:” If I hadn’t signed with PokerStars I would be a much better player today. I would be infinitely better. It sounds really bad, and I really enjoy working for PokerStars, but look at the paths me and Ivey took. We were on a similar level and he just played poker non-stop and I started doing a lot more media work. It’s no coincidence that he became the best player in the world and I fell off the map a little. I still think I am one of the best, but I need to work a lot harder on my game.”

From here the interview turns away from Negreanu and towards the younger players in the poker world, who in Negreanu’s opinion are not the most interesting people in the world. With a few exceptions –Daniel mentions Sam Trickett and Luke Schwartz by name—he feels the online generation of players all have similar back-stories and don’t do enough to make the game interesting or fun.

One example Negreanu makes is the way the older players started games, and welcomed less-experienced players (a nice way of saying bad) making them feel comfortable, but how the online kids are more “cutthroat” and are ready to call a fish a fish.

You can read the interview here at pokerplayer.co.uk (it’s a fascinating read and Negreanu at his best).

This wasn’t the only bit of Negreanu news this past week, considering, just days after the interview, Negreanu revealed that his E-Mail account had been hacked, and it seems the same hacker was able to get gain access to his PokerStars account where he proceeded to drop $50,000 in the span of 400 hands playing under Negreanu’s moniker –according to Negreanu PokerStars has compensated him for those losses. We’ll try to update you on this development as more information comes to light.

Tags: Annie Duke, Best Player, Coincidence, Controversial Line, Controversial Remarks, Current State, Daniel Negreanu, Lex, marchese, Online Poker, Phil Ivey, Poker Game, Poker Player, Poker World, PokerStars, Professional Poker, Trickett, Veldhuis, Waiting Lists, William Reynolds

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 at 8:26 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.