Five Thoughts: Mercier Opens Up, Galfond Opens Up Shop and Negreanu Plays The Shill

Previous members of the World Series of Poker’s November Nine have found a ton of success playing tournaments in the lead up to the final table, and this year will be no different, after a week in which two of this year’s players both booked big scores.

Some of the game’s biggest names also stayed the spotlight, with Daniel Negreanu talking with PokerNews, Jason Mercier promising to stream his WCOOP High Roller efforts and Phil Galfond telling the world he’s ready to get into the online poker operator business.

All this and more on 888poker’s foray into festivals in this week’s Five Thoughts.

A Company Man Stream of Consciousness Ready To Run It Success Breeds Success A Festival of Festivals

1. A Company Man

Daniel Negreanu is never short on opinions. That fact was once again on display in a wide-ranging interview with tournament poker’s all-time leading money winner and PokerNews’ Live Reporting Manager Frank Op de Woerd in Barcelona last month. The piece ran on this site this week.

Leaning towards liberalism myself, I’m often on Negreanu’s side politically and on many issues facing the poker community. I believe he’s a logical thinker; he does what he does and says what he says for the love of the game — A position that’s always easy to support. But reading this particular interview, I began to take issue with what I see as a disturbing trend.

Whether it’s ultimately a plan by Amaya’s media relations department, or just Negreanu going off on his own, the biggest ambassador for the brand, and poker as a whole, seems to be turning into somewhat of a corporate apologist these days.

First, with the public relations blunder that was the last minute changes to the site’s SuperNove Elite rewards program, and now, with changes to the payout structures at live events and other issues facing the company, Negreanu seems to continually be the one trotted out to explain where the company is coming from. He’s the one making the excuses. No other Team PokerStars Pros seems to have anything to say on matters of corporate policy. Most seem able to simply play the game, while Negreanu plays the face of the company.

As a result of all this, Kid Poker had to face a little fire in the Op de Woerd interview, explaining where the “mind-blowing promotions” he allegedly said were coming to the site had disappeared to. Negreanu played a little semantics here, letting Op de Woerd know he never actually made any promises, the promotions could still be coming down the pipe in the near future and apologizing again for shake-ups at Amaya that may have slowed down the whole process.

The disappointing part of all this isn’t that the promotions aren’t here, it’s that Negreanu even had to answer these questions in the first place. The fact is, if poker’s greatest ambassador hadn’t been put, or put himself, in the position to answer for the company’s sins in the first place, he wouldn’t have to be dancing around these subjects now. We all love that Negreanu shoots from the hip and tells it like it is, but I don’t think anybody, outside of the people in Amaya’s PR department, is enjoying this new corporate spin master side of …

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