Negreanu Bets He Can Win 3 WSOP Bracelets

Since Chris Moneymaker blew the poker world up by winning the WSOP Main Event off the back of a $40 satellite it has gotten pretty tough to take down a bracelet. Where once upon a time several hundred players was a good turnout for the big one, now that’s the kind of field that the smallest bracelet events attract.

So what odds would you give that one of the best poker players in the world could take down a bracelet in a given year? Got your number in your head. Well, how about three bracelets in one year? Were you offering even money, because that’s what Daniel Negreanu offered fellow gambler Ben Lamb.

Even money on Negreanu winning three bracelets this year. Unfortunately, Negreanu’s announcement (via Tweet) didn’t say exactly how much he was putting down on that bet, and he pretty quickly tweeted again to say that he had hit the cap which he very wisely had set himself. Despite plenty of people who were happy to offer him slightly better odds (11-10 in one somewhat sarcastic case) he seems to have booked all the action on that one that he wants.

If anyone is a good bet for this then Daniel is. With six bracelets and ninety six cashes at the WSOP already he has as good a chance as anyone, but even so, for comparison Vanessa Selbst offered 180-1 odds to Jason Mercier on a similar bet – three bracelets in one year (what a sweat that turned out to be).

So far there are only seven players to have won three or more bracelets in a year, and no one has won that many in the last seven series running, not since Geoffrey Lisandro pulled off a hat-trick – braclet-trick? – in 2009. Even so, according to a recent vlog Daniel has already bought the display cases for his three new bracelets.

One imagines this is far more about motivating DNegs to play as many games as possible rather than about turning a profit. He does often takes bracelet bets as a kick to keep him showing up in tournaments that otherwise might not hold his attention. I imagine it’s hard to play seriously in a $2,000 entry tournament when that’s the small blind in your regular game.

But I don’t think we’ve ever seen a display of such rampant optimism from him before.For example, when describing one of his previous bets on his blog this was the reasoning he gave when setting odds:

“Here’s how I came with 5-1: For me to show a profit with this bet I’d have to win a bracelet 1 out of every 5 years,” he writes. “If I won one bracelet in 6 years than I’d break even [...] I imagine that I’d average playing in 25 events a year. So, in order to make a profit with this bet I’d have to win 1 out of my next 125 WSOP events. If I won one out of the next 150 WSOP events I played I’d break even. I don’t think I’ve ever gone 150 tournaments without a win.”

Five to one, and that was just for one bracelet. Perhaps this year he knows something we don’t; maybe he’ll be playing the series with a tarot deck.