Doug Polk Reviews His High Stakes Feud Victory Over Daniel Negreanu

Doug Polk has produced an in-depth review of the High Stakes Feud which ended last week. Doug Polk won the High Stakes Feud against Daniel Negreanu by a margin of $1.2 million.

Doug Polk praised Daniel Negreanu for taking on the challenge of switching from live tournaments to online heads-up play. Polk begins by pointing out the great difficulty of switching from a live tournament speciality to an online heads-up challenge. Although we already knew this it was nice to see him throw some praise in Negreanu’s direction for the enormous challenge that he took on. He thought Negreanu played well overall. Only a couple of areas being bad with his main issue being way too conservative to get all of the money in for at least half of the match. Eventually Negreanu released this and the resulting adjustment freed up his thinking in order to be able to fight in many different spots. Polk thinks that Negreanu would beat anybody who is not an experienced professional in this format, which is big praise indeed.

Doug Polk's team calculated that Daniel Negreanu was not aggressive enough until near the end of the match. In the video we learn that Polk’s team calculated some of Negreanu’s frequencies and it was obvious that he wasn’t being aggressive enough until close to the end of the match. If Negreanu had started the challenge playing this way it would likely have been much closer. The video review is almost one hour long but definitely worth watching. Polk goes quite in depth into a number of areas giving us an interesting behind the scenes look at what level of analysis is required to be a player at the very top level.

BetOnline has opened a market for a potential match between Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth, with Negreanu as the heavy favorite. Doug Polk seemed to make it clear that he would not be playing any rematch but we can never be sure. When people start offering millions of dollars in side bets it can be difficult to resist the opportunity. One man who did step up to the plate to face Daniel Negreani is another live tournament specialist—none other than Phil Hellmuth!