Off Topic: Doug Polk back in DNegs’ face; Negreanu’s IQ doesn’t save him from Twitch ban; Mike Matusow not penalised; Making poker more friendly

07/29/2020

In this column we deliver you the latest and most interesting news and gossip from our favourite poker people.

Doug Polk back in DNegs’ face

Just when you thought 2020 had enough negativity, Doug Polk comes out of YouTube retirement and delivers once again with a hate-mongering video against the controversial poker legend Daniel Negreanu.

Polk’s latest video is a fast-paced edit of the (in)famous Masterclass pre-roll ad on YouTube and the recent violent outbursts of KidPoker while live streaming on Twitch, illustrating the different faces of the poker star. And Polk even threw in an old “black face” video of Daniel for good measure to discredit him even further.

https://youtu.be/tcVleKmQAFM

The poker community is as always torn about Polk’s anger-filled content. Many support Doug in his mission to troll Daniel Negreanu and his former employer PokerStars as much as possible, but for a change, there has been a bit of backlash for Doug from poker fans.

For the most, people found it funny. Even Daniel himself reacted with humour, but it’s obvious that this is probably just his way of coping with things like this.

Moral of the story:

Be yourself. If sometimes that includes you being an idiot or an asshole, feel free to laugh at yourself

You don’t have to be proud of it, but you also don’t have to beat yourself up over it

No one is perfect. Trying to be is exhausting

— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) July 28, 2020

This feud has been going for four years and it’s not likely to end any time soon. Joey Ingram made the suggestion for both players to settle in a heads-up match, but that is unlikely to solve anything. Joey produced a video himself, pointing out that it has gotten ugly now, to summarize the feud between the two poker personalities:

Negreanu’s IQ doesn’t save him from Twitch ban

It never gets boring around Daniel Negreanu. In midst of angry outbursts while live streaming, the above mentioned hate campaign of Doug Polk and his birthday celebrations, Daniel recently announced that he is actually really really smart.

He had taken the test to become a Mensa member (Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world) and passed with a great score, leading him to record a pride-filled video message on Twitter, pointing out just how smart he really was:

I decided to take the test to become a Mensa member and I ACED IT!

Eat somma that!!!!

Very few people could do this on their first try. I am one of those people. #Mensa #StableGenius pic.twitter.com/htHTb6SbWG

— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) July 23, 2020

But being smart is relative and during a poker live stream Negreanu took it way too far allowing chat trolls to trigger him into voicing physical threats on his Twitch channel. This promptly earned him a permanent ban from the streaming platform.

During his stream he showed how NOT to respond to Twitch trolls and used an array of profanities a poker ambassadors should be, well, smarter to use:

“Hey, Tom Estrada, go f**k yourself, you piece of s**t,” he yelled. “Block that c**k motherf*****g piece of s**t. F**k you, f**k you, f**k you in your ass. How about that? Okay, Tom Estrada, f**k you in your ass. Eat some of that, you piece of s**t. Come f******g step to me and say that and I will knock you the f**k out. How about that?”

“I will break your f*****g teeth if you come step to me.” He continues that he would feed Tom’s teeth to him “anally.”

This of course, called upon Daniel’s bigger named trolls like David Lappin and Shaun Deeb to work towards him getting banned and they apparently succeeded.

Another meltdown from Negreanu. Threats of physical and sexual violence to someone in the @Twitch chat. pic.twitter.com/ZZGWUs1xNe

— 🃏 David Lappin 🃏 (@dklappin) July 25, 2020

I mean as much as I hate the guy in this clip that’s just not the way to represent yourself Or our industry hope @Twitch looks into this and bans his ass since @wsoponline won’t do anything https://t.co/E0ZsDDnG1L

— shaun deeb (@shaundeeb) July 25, 2020

Daniel responded with little remorse and is continuing to stream his WSOP play on Periscope and YouTube, hopefully with better poker ambassador behaviour.

A message to my loyal and dedicated trolls. All the usual suspects. I missed you!

So glad I could provide you with some content to obsess over. You are welcome!

Gotta get that clickbait money to sell poker coaching!#Clicks4RentMoney pic.twitter.com/3PkKeD8jir

— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) July 26, 2020

Mike Matusow won’t be penalised

And while Daniel ‘DNegs’ Negreanu actually got penalised for his violent outbursts at least by the streaming platform Twitch, Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow will not face any repercussions for his threats towards fellow players during his streams playing on WSOP.com. We reported about this incident in a previous article.

As Matusow had streamed on his personal channel with no official WSOP connotation the poker company will not take any action against Matusow’s behaviour.

“We take prevention of abusive behavior at WSOP tournaments or on the WSOP.COM platform extremely seriously. We have a number of preventive measures online including recently disabling our chat entirely,” said Ty Stewart, Executive Director of the WSOP. “But the regulation of content on our customer’s personal streams and social media accounts is a slippery slope, particularly as each of these third-party platforms have their own escalation procedures. We reserve the right to suspend the account of any individual going forward, but in this case, it appears the player had the perfect response to resolve the situation herself.”

Poker events moving to the online realm and being streamed have taught us a lot of things when it comes to behaviours or players and viewers and while it’s unlikely that this will ever be prevented, we can still hope that poker and online poker will be more friendly to allow more new players to take part and join us at the tables.

Making poker more friendly

And in order to bring a bit of a friendly laugh to the poker community a TikTok video has gone viral during the past week with a video filter turning poker faces into grinning faces.

The video has actually been produced by the very author of this article Christin Maschmann.