$50M Poker Pro Shares His Best Advice For Founders

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You know, I went broke many, many times, but the downswings are probably the most important part, and typically with like a breakdown, things are going badly. That's an opportunity for a breakthrough.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
All right, today we got Daniel Negreanu. He is here. I've been watching this guy on TV, feels like half my life. He is a poker player who, I think you've had over 50 million, in tournament caches, so tournament winnings. You're known for your ability to read people, for your longevity in the game, for your personality, and how you've built a brand around the game of poker. I think you've won something like, is it five, six World Series poker bracelets?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:44)
Well, we're at seven, but it should be a lot more if I'm being honest.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:49)
And he's humble to boot. So here he is, Daniel Negreanu. Listen, people are gonna be like, why are you guys having a poker player on a business podcast? And the reason is, hey, I'm selfish. I played poker my whole life, and I wanted to talk to this guy. And that's what the podcast is. But B, there are so many parallels between poker and business, whether it's thinking about it in terms of investing, around bankroll management, around pot odds, and things like this. All these frameworks that I've used for poker in business, but also the people side, the human side, the reading people side. And you were one of the best at that. So thanks for coming on, dude.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:21)
Absolutely. You're absolutely right with your description too, because there's just so many things about poker. Poker, you have to register as a small business anyway, right? You're just self-employed, and getting out of bed to go into work is up to you. But you still have to make smart decisions, invest, and look for plus-EV situations.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:39)
So, Sam, I don't know if you followed poker back in the day, the famous players.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:45)
Yeah, and I watched it on TV with Phil Ivey and Daniel. I've seen Daniel so many times.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
And they look like a lot of us, like Doyle Brunson, they look like cowboys, right? And they had these big personalities. And it was like superheroes who would come to a table. And one guy was just like the stone cold. You can't read him. Another guy was the talker. Another guy, he just was, you know, had no fear gene in his body. He could just risk it all. And that was the sort of persona of like these charismatic, like personality poker players. And then if you fast forward, now it's like hoodie on, sunglasses on, scrawny kid who's doing math and basically, like, is in many ways like it's a numbers game and versus like the way that poker used to have this sort of gunslinger mentality. Daniel, is that accurate how I described it?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:28)
Pretty much. I mean, you know, the difference between, and I think this is true with chess and other games too, the difference between like Bobby Fisher was asked, you know, he's like, well, who's the greatest chess player of all time? Right? And he's like, it's not fair. You can't make this, like the players in 1905, right? Brilliant people, they didn't have access to the tools that they have now. So with both, or these kids more, back in my day, people had to figure it out on their own. Doyle Brunson, before he had computers, he would run simulations by literally getting a deck of cards, a piece of paper and a pencil. He would take an ace and a king against a pair of fours, run out the board and say, okay, ace, king, one. And he would do it like a hundred thousand times, right? Now, obviously, the click of a button, you know, you have this data available to you. So it was a different type of skill set. And you're right.
A lot of the more modern players are much more deliberate. They take a lot more time because they're actually doing, for the most part, they're doing calculations we didn't use to do. It used to be like this. I look at Sam and I'm like, yeah, Sam's full of it. He doesn't have it. I call, right? That's the equation. However, now people are doing what's called, this might be a little bit above your audience's level of understanding, but counting combinations. I'm just saying, because it's very, even for most poker players, they don't understand, like, combination tricks, okay? So, for example, you think your opponent has ace-king. How many ace-kings are possible? Right? That's a difficult question for somebody who doesn't play poker, right? Well, there's four aces and there's four kings, right? So that's 16 Okay? So what you're doing in your head, or what these people are doing, is they're counting, not just ace-king is one, but 16, and then using other effects to decide, like, you know, the pot odds, what they have. Like I said, it's kind of complex and that probably shouldn't go down that.