Polk all-in

Doug Polk is an “all-in or fold” type of person. The Grudge Match with Daniel Negreanu may have begun with a bluff – Doug genuinely didn’t think that Dnegs would ever say yes – but once the challenge was accepted, Polk gave it his full focus. Fail to prepare. Prepare to fail. Polk was gifted a huge opportunity and he would not have been able to forgive himself had he left money on the table. Coming out of retirement to battle his greatest nemesis, no stone was left unturned in the pursuit of a famous victory.

Since winning his challenge, Doug Polk has done a flurry of media, appearing on almost a dozen poker podcasts, pulling back the curtain on how he parted Daniel Negreanu from $1.2m. In short, it took a village. 

Doug’s team

Appearing on “The Lock-In,” Doug described the victory as “humbling” for Daniel as he detailed the process by which he retooled his game from the ground up. He paid tribute to his coaches: two players who go by the Twitter handles @frabbxd and @clickered777, the latter of whom is only 20 years old and rated by Doug to be the best No-Limit Hold’em Heads-Up cash game player in the world. Anonymity is vital when trying to get action in the highest stakes games online, hence Polk only referring to them by their aliases. 

statistics revealed no major gaps for him to exploit

Doug tipped his hat to the people he called “The Upswing Convoy,” a group of volunteers from his poker community who tracked Daniel’s statistics in search of imbalances. Credit here to Daniel as Doug said that these statistics revealed no major gaps for him to exploit. 

Doug also expressed his gratitude to Bryan Pellegrino, Ryan Zarick and “caleb_banister,” describing them collectively as NASA. With their help, he worked on performance, training his brain and getting to grips with some very cutting edge poker tools.

Polk’s use of cutting-edge software 

Speaking on Joey Ingram’s “Poker Life Podcast,” Polk went into the weeds on the Solver and Training software he used:

PioSolver is a Game Theory Optimal Solver that handles post-flop spots with arbitrary starting ranges, stack sizes, bet sizes, as well as desired accuracy. In other words, it is a sophisticated “toy game” solver that can figure out the optimal line that a player should take given a fixed range of hands and predetermined bet size options. 

Lucid GTO is a practice tool, pitting you against a perfectly balanced opponent and giving you real-time feedback on your decisions to quickly identify leaks. This is a particularly clever piece of software, with the ability to zero in on the weakest parts of your game, coming up with drills suited to shoring up your leaks. 

These sophisticated pieces of software are just two of the tools available on the market to poker players help refine and sharpen their games, but diligently using them did not mean that it would be smooth sailing for Polk. As is the nature of the beast, the heads-up match was swingy and no more so than in the very last session. 

The final session shaped the narrative

Doug went into that session up $946,085 with 1,718 of the 25,000 total hands left to play. He immediately lost over five buy-ins (~$220,000) and with roughly 1,000 hands left, it was looking considerably more respectable for Negreanu who was winning the second half of the challenge and beating the spread (the bookies made him 4-1 on the challenge implying that the line was an $800,000 loss). Had it ended there, Polk would still have had a resounding victory, but what he craved was total annihilation. 

clawed back the $220,000 session loss and then moved into overdrive

For the next three hours, it was all Polk as he clawed back the $220,000 session loss and then moved into overdrive, winning an additional $260,000. A cowed Negreanu cut a forlorn, diminutive figure, complaining about luck in his post-match interview on GGPoker’s YouTube channel. Meanwhile, a buoyant, larger-than-life Polk celebrated with with Upswing commentators Jamie Kerstetter and Nick Schulman, talking about the value of preparation and hard work. 

The winner certainly took it all, including the media lap of honor that is still in progress.