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In a video he posted on his YouTube channel yesterday, Daniel Negreanu decided to break down a hand between Miss Finland, Sara Chafak and high stakes poker pro Ronnie Bardah that was played on the poker TV show Shark Cage back in 2014. Doug Polk also covered the same hand days after it happened more than two years before Negreanu. Polk and Negreanu have been having a spat online for a long time now, which makes the situation a little piquant.
The famous hand both poker pros decided to cover was played December 2014 on the Shark Cage: the very first hand at a 6-handed table. Model Sara Chafak limped in with A2 off from middle position, then the action folded to Ronnie Bardah in the big blind who checked his 8-4 off. The flop came Q54 with two spades, giving Bardah bottom pair and Miss Finland a gutshot straight draw. Bardah bet his fours on the flop to which Chafak reacted with a min re-raise. The turn was the street where things went really off the rails: Bardah improved to trips, he checked them over to Chafak who continued to bluff, then got re-raised. It's not often we see a turn 3-bet with Ace high, yet Chafak fired it: a raise that surprised her opponent a great deal. The river was a brick (6) for both players, Bardah checked again and Chafak fired the last barrel: she went all-in. After much tanking and agonizing Bardah laid down his winning hand.
"WCGRider" Polk did not give much credit to Miss Finland, in his video analysis he even speculated that she may not know the poker hand ranking and she was not aware that she was running an insane bluff line. This is contradicted by the fact that under the unique rules of the show on the river the players were requested to slide either a "bluff" or a "value" card forward, indicating their intention and she chose the bluff card. You can watch his full commentary below.
Negreanu was more generous to Chafak in his video: he saw merit in her flop min re-raise and her turn decision as well. What both of the adversarial pro cardplayers agreed on is that going all-in on the river was a good move since any smaller bluff would not have gone through. They also both agreed that Bardah should have called anyway. Here's Negreanu's take on the hand. Negreanu does acknowledge in the beginning of the video that the hand "has been done" already, not mentioning Polk by name.
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As many of you know, Polk and Negreanu have been having a bit of an online fight for a while: the whole thing started with Negreanu trying to make the point how PokerStars raising the rake can be beneficial for players. Polk has been excessively criticizing him for that on multiple occasions, he even hosted a meme-making contest making fun of the comment [4]. The two poker pros had some direct interactions on Twitter about the issue too.