The Polk-Negreanu feud will be going on for a while yet. Although the game had a get-out clause written into it, the option to duck out won't be exercised.
The player who is down at the halfway point hands was allowed to tap out of the match. That happened at 12.5k hands, a point that came in the last session of 2020. Negreanu was down and so had the option to call it quits. He took a few days to think it over, then opted to stay in.
Doug Polk tweeted ahead of the session, "The final $200/$400 grudge match session of 2020 is today at 2:30pm PT (22:30 GMT). [...] We will be hitting the 12,500 hand mark today. Will DNegs tap out? Tune in to find out!"
After 534 hands of play on December 28th, the challenge shut down for the year. It will resume today.
The poker world was on tenterhooks for the days following.
If Negreanu had quit without penalty, Doug would still have quite happily finished up the year with over $750k in hand as a tidy profit.
Daniel Negreanu has not exercised his option to quit. The game will continue.
He tweeted about the matter on January 1st, 2021, "It’s Jan 1st 2021 and we have reached the halfway point of the challenge having played 12,500 hands. As agreed upon in the rules I have the option to quit. That is not going to happen."
Polk responded "Lets gooooooooooo."
New year's resolution
Negreanu quitting would have been an anti-climax. This way the avid audience will get some sort of resolution. One side is going to be disappointed.
Some have speculated — mostly facetiously — that Polk dumped chips that last session to keep Daniel sweet. For example, Sean Deeb tweeted "Nice to see @DougPolkVids punting today to make sure Daniel has a winning session and doesn’t quit at 12.5k hands."
Either way, in that last session Negreanu squeezed out one of his few profitable sitdowns of the challenge. It is not clear if that influenced his desire to continue as much as his general competitiveness.
One can only imagine how much it would sting DNegs to give DPolk the satisfaction of a surrender. Dodging that alone might be worth $1 million to the Canadian.
The game is getting back under way today, with a 2:30 PM (Vegas Time) kick-off.
And now, to play us out...
One of the other outcomes of the call to continue has been Thomas Keeling tweeting in a fit of jealousy.
Better known as SrslySirius, Keeling tweeted a video with the caption "This is terrible and I love it." The video was someone elses song parody of Doug Polk begging DNegs not to quit.
Featured image source: Flickr
