Daniel Negreanu Responds to Joe Ingram and Doug Polk on His Podcast

“As far as I’m concerned he’s a net negative because most of what he does is looking to create drama by shitting on everybody else. (...) That’s kinda shitty, to shit on people just to get views.” - said Negreanu about Doug Polk on his podcast.

The adversarial relationship between Doug Polk and Daniel Negreanu goes way back. Although at times it seemed they were on the path to making it up with each other, their feud arguably reached its peak earlier this month when during a live stream with Joe Ingram, Polk accused Negreanu of directing backhanded insults at him on Twitter and also brought up the issue that sparked the feud originally with a revived passion - the time when in October 2016, Negreanu defended PokerStars’ rake increases. In that rant, “WCGRider” Polk went as far as calling his Canadian foe an “embarrassment to the game” and “a little bitch”.

Negreanu came out with a new episode of his podcast on his own YouTube channel in which he and Eric Wasserson went through the American Poker Awards nominees - given the fact that both Negreanu and Polk are nominated in multiple categories it was impossible to avoid addressing the elephant in the room.

The first person KidPoker called out by name wasn’t Polk, however - it was Joe Ingram. Ingram claimed that Negreanu only does things in poker which he gets paid for; Negreanu refuted that saying he works with WSOP officials to improve on many aspects of the tournament series despite getting no compensation.

When the “Poker Journalist of the Year” category came up, Negreanu praised one of the nominees, Steve Ruddock for writing a piece defending his controversial stance on how increased rake can be good for recreational players - evidently, Polk too was mentioned in the conversation quickly afterwards.

“My favorite part of like, one of the videos that [Polk] recently did was he said this: he said ‘actions speak louder than words’, then went on to talk about a bunch of words that I said. Not a single action I took to increase rake in any way, shape or form.”

Things got heated again when Negreanu and Wasserson got to the “Poker’s Biggest Influencer” award - understandably, since one of Polk’s biggest contentions in his latest attack was that when Negreanu was wondering on Twitter about what an “influencer” is precisely, he was covertly saying that Polk shouldn’t be among the nominees. Negreanu denied he was indicating that. 

“I was trying to get an understanding of how these four names match together. As far as following goes, two people have one , two people don’t. As far as people being in the industry, two people are very well into the industry, one person spends time in the industry, the other one spends time shitting on the industry - like every aspect of it.” 

Then Negreanu granted Polk that he is capable of bringing new people into the game by reaching a large audience with his popular YouTube videos, but also criticized him for - in Negreanu’s view - attacking other people in the poker world to garner more views.

Polk was involved in many online feuds before: he got into into a spat with Jason Mercier for tagging him as a “bad reg” with his PokerStars account; later he made a video accusing Alec Torelli of angle shooting, and he often mocks Luke Schwartz for his recent online cash game results.

Polk hasn’t responded to Negreanu’s latest comments on social media yet - but perhaps partly to counter the accusations of only spreading negativity about other players, he uploaded a video titled “Who Is THE BEST? Top 10 Cash Game Poker Players” hours after Negreanu posted his video.