Negreanu Challenge: Who is the Favourite?

Tomorrow, on 10 March, the heads-up matches of the Negreanu Challenge will be played. Let us inspect the teams in comparison to determine the favourite!

Daniel Negreanu has recently challenged FTP Pros Gus Hansen, Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom and Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan to heads-up SNG matches. Three duels will be played among the teams of three: Negreanu picked four times WSOP champion Isaac ‘luvtheWNBA’ Haxton and Betrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier as his teammates.

The three matches will be played on 10 March on FTP: while players will be at the Grosvenor Victoria Casino, they will not play live but on laptops in front of each other. All players bet $50,000, which means the winning team will be $50,000 to $150,000 richer. In addition, the losing side will have to finance buy-ins for the winners in a total worth of $10,000 for each player.

PokerStars has recently published some interesting statistics: in the first chart, you can see a comparison of the teams, while in the second the individual team members are compared, according to their live and online winnings, among else.

Considering sheer results only, the PokerStars pros appear to be the clear favourite, winning more both live and online. However, these stats only consider tournament results, possibly because the challenge will feature heads-up matches with increasing blinds.

To get a better picture, we took a look at the online high stakes cash game performance of the pros as well. The results that follow below might be a little surprising, as only two of the six players have a positive balance.

Team PS:

Daniel ’KidPoker’Negreanu: $-401,018 (PS)
Isaac ’luvtheWNBA’ Haxton: $210,551 (PS), $-665,361 (FTP)
Bertrand ’ElkY’ Grospellier: $10,182 (PS)

Team FTP:

Viktor ’Isildur1’Blom: $-219,497 (FTP), $-1,201,205 (PS)
Tom ’durrrr’ Dwan: $2,599,835 (FTP)
Gus Hansen: $-8,034,533 (FTP)

If we take NLHE performance into consideration only, the impression changes even more: ‘Isildur1’ is the second biggest winner of all time in the game type with $3,647,534, while ‘durrrr’ is the 5th on the same list with $2,891,461. The rest of the participants are not in the top 50 NLHE high stakes players.

The following pairs will clash tomorrow:

Viktor ’Isildur1’Blom v. Bertrand ’ElkY’ Grospellier (10 March, 16:00 CET)
Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan v. Isaac ‘luvtheWNBA’ Haxton (10 March, 19:00 CET)
Gus Hansen v. Daniel ‘KidPoker’ Negreanu (10 March, 22:00 CET)