Negreanu Fires Shots at Ferguson and Hellmuth

When Chris “Jesus” Ferguson took 42 seconds out of his day to read to camera he gave the smouldering trash fire of his reputation a prodding back into a glowing flame. Responses ranged from lynch mob outrage to blind acceptance. Somewhere in the middle Daniel Negreanu was rolling his eyes.

In the smoky afterglow of Ferguson’s message PokerNews sat down with Daniel Negreanu to get his take. The interview is a pretty pithy takedown of exactly what was wrong with the non-pology, but manages to give us Daniel’s insight into both why Ferguson is full of fertiliser and why Phil Hellmuth might have been so anxious to buy it.

“It kind of seems silly to me,” Negreanu said in the interview, describing Chris’ performance. “It almost looked like a hostage situation where he’s reading from a prompter [...] I didn’t hear any personal responsibility. I didn’t hear the biggest shareholder, who convinced everyone that Ray Bitar was the right CEO, really showing genuine responsibility or remorse.”

Negreanu doesn’t pull any punches in his assessment of what happened:

“When he said, ‘I did everything I could post-Black Friday.’ That’s not what everyone else said. They said he hid in Arizona under his covers at his parents’ house.”

As to Chris’s hint that if the full story came out we might not be so quick to blame him?

“I know enough about what happened,” said Negreanu. Adding a little later: “From what I saw, it was gross negligence.”

The interviewer also asked about Phil Hellmuth’s rather credulous response to the idea that there may be a conspiratorial ‘real story’ still to come out. Negreanu was only a little kinder to his long time frenemy:

“I’m not surprised. Hellmuth obviously has his own scandal in his past with Ultimate Bet of course.”