Negreanu may not be the brightest crayon in the box but he sure makes for good convo. Image from kickasspoker.com
Laughing this morning at a minor froufrou featuring Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu and the world’s largest not-nearly-free expression of independent poker thought, 2+2. Negreanu’s brand new, weekly video rant about whatever’s on his mind has quickly drawn a waiting audience, mostly because Negreanu’s entertaining regardless of whether his words actually have merit.
This week, though, barely a month into the new concept, Negreanu’s already jumped the shark, and we can now consign his video-rant series to the trashpile. (It’s not the first time Negreanu’s videos have run aground; he doesn’t learn well from experience.) In the process, he’s earned himself a temp-ban over at Malmuthistan — errm, 2+2 — that’s very well deserved, because in his blind arrogance Negreanu placed 2+2′s too-respectful, unpaid mods into an untenable situation.
Funny stuff all around, and here’s how it played out early this morning. 2+2′s mods have taken up a lazy habit in recent months of naming NVG (News, Views and Gossip) threads the “Official” this or “Official” that, and have used these single large threads as gathering areas for all posts more or less related to a certain topic. Sure, enough, a largish thread containing commentary on Negreanu’s new video blogs was renamed the “Official” thread a couple of weeks back, just about the time Negreanu released his entertaining rant against Annie Duke and Jeffrey Pollack of Epic Poker League infamy.
We’ve talked here previous times about Negreanu’s unmitigated hypocrisy, meaning that it wasn’t a matter of if these new video blogs would derail, but when and how. That happened this time out, when Negreanu started out his video with a commercial for the iSeries event (in which he’s participating), followed by another several minutes explaining how people can bet on it. Negreanu, of course, is a primary participant.
In other words, no rantin’, just a commercial whorin’-it-up.
And sure enough, Daniel first tried to start a new NVG thread at 2+2 about the iSeries (seemingly deleted as spam), then posted a direct link to this week’s video in the above thread… which was again correctly deemed spam, given the minutes-long iSeries spewage before anything resembling new poker commentary appeared from Negreanu.
What’s funny is if Negreanu had been halfway clever and had a third party shill the link (in a circumspect manner) to the video on his behalf, he might have gotten away with it. This is despite the widely accepted fact that shills suck. That’s okay; we expect shills to suck, and 2+2 has a long tradition of having dozens of them posting on behalf of varied sites and businesses at any given moment. The extremes to which some of them have gone in order to shill have often been amazing, and it’s not hard to do it and get away with it, even though I haven’t done it myself. There’s no doubt Negreanu video-spammed to make a buck. After all, the iSeriesLIVE website admits this: “Each player participating in iSeriesLIVE events will actually receive a revenue split of all money that is bet on or against them.”
Still, Negreanu couldn’t set up a proper shill. Instead, because it’s the “official Negreanu video thread,” Negreanu thought he could spam away. There’s those blinders again. I honestly don’t think he’s being evil or disingenuous, either. For whatever reason, Negreanu just can’t comprehend that in spite of being rich and famous, his shit still stinks. It doesn’t make him evil, just kaleidoscopic.
That’s the lede and the explanation, but not the whole story. The attention this morning might be on Negreanu’s deserved temp-ban, but the hidden story of here is how quickly the “rant” part of his supposed weekly video rants has departed the scene. To wit:
(a) Two weeks ago Daniel was ripping Jeffrey Pollack and Annie Duke over the EPL’s blatant, perhaps fraudulent failures. Good stuff, and well worth the view.
(b) Last week, with Erick Lindgren’s bad gambling debts the juicy topic in poker, Negreanu all but failed to mention his good friend’s name and tried to reframe the entire gambling-debt discussion as an old-v.-new school discussion of acceptable poker morals. It was wishy-washy, namby-pamby, milquetoast stuff, and definitely not worth the viewing time.
(c) This week, it’s an infomercial, not a rant at all, making the very concept a lie.
What’s amazing here is not that the concept has dropped its purpose for existing, but that it’s done that so quickly. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if Negreanu had it planned this way all along.
But that would be crass and commercial thinking.
