Negreanu Poker Tournament Tips

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Daniel Negreanu Poker Tournament Tips & Strategy

Dainel Negreanu is one of the world’s leading tournament poker players with 4 WSOPs and 2 WPT championships.  The Canadian (now US-naturalised citizen) PokerStars Pro has often spoken about what it takes to win poker tournaments, specifically about taking down the WSOP and utilising tournament poker strategy.

The Most Important Tournament Skill – Reading Tells

Negreanu is outspoken that the most important secret and hidden caveat of poker tournaments is reading ability.  However, contrary to opinion, this isn’t just about reading a twitchy eye or flared nostril during a bluff.  Reading opponents has nothing to do with psychoanalytical skills, or physiological reflexes.  What Negraenu instead focuses on is hand reading ability.

Negreanu’s Poker Hand Reading Ability

Hand reading ability.  What does this mean?  Negreanu defines hand reading as “the ability to process information that you’ve gathered from your opponents in the current hand and past hands, and to use that information to narrow down your opponent’ holdings.”

What Daniel reiterates, is that the textual conditions (past hand experiences and previous moves – what your opponent is thinking) is much more important than situational conditions (stack size, bet size, table position) for winning poker tournaments.

Picking up on your opponents’ betting patterns and understanding what they are capable of makes playing tournaments much easier.  In online poker, we can use the example of dynamic software tools such as Sharkscope, for reading our opponent’s 3bet ranges in the later stages of a game and making +EV decisions based on this.  Daniel Negreanu tells us every time he faces an opponent in a live tournament game he is concentrating and analysing the player trying to figure out what he is thinking, doing and why.

The importance of facial tells and body language is not cast away.  The point is that hand reads based on the actual betting patterns is more important to tournaments.

Why Do Professional Poker Players Always Stare Down Opponents Then?

Negreanu confesses that the majority of professional live poker players stare down opponents as a scare tactic to make them feel uncomfortable.  It has almost nothing to do in fact with reading opponents body language and tells – “It’s all a ploy, simple as that.”

Manipulate Your Opponent with Body Language

Negreanue offers several tips for adjusting your body language during play.  After all, your opponent will more or less be able to base his decisions on these.  Negreanu admits he to talking to his opponent, or throwing a random comment out here or there, purely for the purpose of trying to read his opponent or manipulate him into doing something.