Daniel Negreanu Beats The Bumhunters For $30k

Daniel Negreanu’s fantastic start to 2018 just got better last night when he took $30,000 from some of the biggest online stars in the game, prompting the ‘bumhunting’ duo of ‘LLinusLLove’ and ‘limitless’ to sit out once the PokerStars ‘bum’ himself called it a day – sparking a discussion about how to avoid being targeted as a fish – or in Negreanu’s case, a whale – online.

Barely a week after setting himself some lofty goals for the year, Negreanu took 4th spot and $521,140 in the PCA $100k Super High Roller and decided to take $10k of that online for a shot at a $50/100 cash game… and it wasn’t long before three of the world’s best decided they could relieve him of his money…

Doubtless Linus ‘LLinusLLove’ Loeliger, German online crusher Daris ‘Dex888’ Pedes and ‘limitless’ had viewed Negreanu as easy meat, the Canadian not often found at the highest stakes online anymore – but Negreanu was on a roll…

Podcast guru and PLO expert Chicago Joey, aka Joey Ingram in real life, was quick to jump on Daniel’s apparent inability to think of a solution to the ‘bumhunting’ problem which has plagued the game somewhat – good players specifically targeting weaker players and scaring them out of the game…

As the screenshot from Negreanu’s table above shows, the PokerStars rule is that if dealing stops for a certain amount of time, the table will close – but that’s really only a sticky-plaster approach. Naturally there is a way to stop this completely, but few sites have been willing to go there – completely anonymous tables. As Twitter user Rick Trigg says in the discussion – ‘BAN USERNAMES’.

If you don’t know who someone is, you can’t bumhunt them – but usernames have been part and parcel of online poker since it started; people want their own names, want to follow others - big names in particular - and track the winners and losers.

In the meantime, PokerStars trialled ‘SeatMe’ on its Spanish version of the site last year – and this week announced France will join them, with a further rollout across all sites to be implemented in due course.

As Severin Rasset wrote on the PokerStars site this week, SeatMe has worked at ‘greatly reducing players' ability to hunt specific opponents, completely preventing the use of seating scripts, and creating an environment where recreational players play more hands.’

Whether it will work as a long-term solution is yet to be seen of course, but if PokerStars and others combined it with some of ChicagoJoey’s ideas it might well do the trick. For now, at least, striking Negreanu off the ‘fish’ list will have to do for the high-stakes sharks!