Daniel Negreanu is one of the most affable and loquacious professional poker players around. He’s always talking, often with a smile on his face and rarely is there a dull moment with this dude. So it must take some serious needling for him to issue a challenge of a unique heads-up match at EPT London.
Turns out, Gus Hansen accomplished that after the Dane took to Twitter to remind Negreanu about the infamous High Stakes Poker hand that saw Kid Poker lose over $500,000 in one of the most memorable poker hands in the history of televised high-stakes.
Not one to back down from some ‘high-stakes’ ribbing, Negreanu responded and took to YouTube to issue a challenge to Hansen and, in KidPoker’s words, ” your two cronies, Viktor Blom and Tom Dwan to a heads-up Battleship match at EPT London“.
The gauntlet has been thrown, Gus Hansen.
Negreanu went on and explained that he already went to the proper channels – PokerStars execs – to have the challenge green-lighted and it appears that he may have gotten it and is in the process of setting the whole thing up with EPT London organizers. That is if Hansen accepts, which we have full confidence he will. These two legends of the felt never saw a poker challenge they didn’t think they’d win, so it’ll be shocking to see if Gus Hansen declines Daniel Negreanu’s challenge.
As far as who KidPoker’s teammates are going to be, he’s letting fans help him decide which two pros they’d like to see him with take on Hansen, Blom, and Dwan at EPT London. In the same YouTube video, Negreanu threw out a number of names from Team PokerStars Pros, including Vanessa Selbst, Jason Mercier, Eugene Katchalov, Elky Grospellier, and Issac Haxton.
Negreanu also explained his proposed format involving three freezeout tables running simultaneoulsy with the player who wins two of the three tables winning his/her respective individual match. The overall winner will then be determined by the team who wins two of the three games that will be played.
Again, we’re confident that Gus Hansen will reply soon and take up Negreanu’s challenge because at the end of the day, there’s a grain of truth behind KidPoker’s words: a match-up like this is great for poker.
Hard to argue against that point.
