A chequered past is perhaps what goes in favour of poker professional Daniel Negreanu. For a high school dropout who entered the poker circuit using all means - legal and illegal, Negreanu has sure gone a long way and made a great career.

Talking about his World Series of Poker bracelets, while he took home $1,69,460 in the $2,000 Pot Limit Hold’em in 1998, it was $100,440 in the $2,000 S.H.O.E. in 2003, $169,100 in the $2,000 Pot Limit Hold’em in 2004 and $204,874 in the $2,000 Limit Hold’em in 2008.

Negreanu began on a firm foot and sustained his winning streak in the years to come, as the World Series bracelets kept coming to him and he appeared at 12 final tables. In 2004, he was named World Series of Poker player of the year and in 2005 he was adjudged player of the year in the World Poker Tour.

Bigger honours were in store for Negreanu as he signed up like a celebrity for brand endorsement. A case in point is of the Wynn Las Vegas resort which appointed Daniel Negreanu to be its brand ambassador. Negreanu was free to play for any stake in the poker room of the resort. The fallout with the sponsor came when Negreanu expressed reservations against the endorsement keeping him from playing higher stakes outside.

Success made Negreanu enterprising and in December 2005, he announced his private online poker cardroom on his official website Full Contact Poker. On the same site, Negreanu blogs and gives tips and advises on the game. His screen name is KidPoker and he played high stakes online.

This became the stepping stone for bigger things and Negreanu found alternate use for the Full Contact Poker website to launch a competition through which he announced he would select a protégé and will try to groom him in order to become a world class poker professional. He even offered to sponsor the $10,000-dollar entry of the protégé in four buy-in events. The first protégé selected by Daniel Negreanu was Brian Fidler.

There was a series of tie-ups in 2007, including with PokerStars to become a team with Chris Moneymaker, Joe Hachem and Greg Raymer. Negreanu goes sniffing for challenges not only on the poker table but at the golf course too.  

He lets his secret out and attributes his success to keen observation of the rivals moves, body language, etc. To make his celebrity status profound, Negreanu has played regularly on the popular television shows Late Night Poker, Poker After Dark and High Stakes Poker, besides commentating as the host on Ultimate Poker Challenge. His television repertoire boasts also of his participation in the third season of Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament. Furthermore, the Fox Reality series Rob and Amber: Against the Odds also featured Daniel Negreanu. The deal was that Negreanu had to groom Reality TV celebrity Rob Mariano to play poker like a pro. The highlight of 2008 was Negreanu’s winning the British Columbia Poker Championships and earning $371,910 Canadian dollars.   

Negreanu is also the author of the book ‘Power Hold’em Strategy’, which was released in 2008. Celebrities like Tobey Maguire take lessons in poker from Daniel Negreanu.

Negreanu has amassed huge fortunes playing poker and his total live tournament earnings are estimated at a whopping $12,427,047, which is Number 2 on the all time money list. In the World Series of Poker, his cash earnings stand at $2,570,962. He is the highest earner on the World Poker Tournament circuit.

Showbiz has sure spoiled Negreanu for bigger things and he has appeared as poker player in ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ and in ‘The Grand’. In fact, he has even played himself in the Hollywood film ‘Lucky You’. There have also been non-poker or semi-poker stints like Season 2 of Sports Science in which he shows if a professional poker player has the capability to cheat a lie detector. In Katy Perry’s music video for ‘Waking up in Vegas’, you can spot Daniel Negreanu…playing poker!