Daniel Negreanu endured a horrific run of two years without a win before taking down last year's $300k buy-in Super High Roller Bowl.
"Will the monkey finally be removed from Daniel's back?" Ali Nejad said in commentary as the river card dropped to give him the win and the $3,312,000 first prize.
"I got to tell you," Negreanu said to Jeff Platt afterwards, "the last two years... look I hate whining about bad luck, it's the worst, no one wants to hear it. But I've been feeling it. It's so frustrating; you feel like you're playing, but the results aren't there... The last two years of all-ins have been the worst it's ever been."
It obviously meant a lot. You could see it in his celebration afterwards. And Negreanu will be looking to make it back-to-back Super High Roller wins when the cards hit the air in the Aria on Thursday.
It's been done twice before – with Justin Bonomo in 2018 and Timothy Adams in 2020 – and you wouldn't bet against Kid Poker.
Ahead of Super High Roller Bowl VIII, you can see how he did it last time – PokerGO has just released the entirety of the final table for free on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv8Gu6FbRrQ
Negreanu sells 25% staking package
There are plenty of other people who will be sweating Negreanu from the rail. The GGPoker pro is one of four players who listed a SHRB package on PokerStake. The reinging champ was the only one who listed with no markup, and he's sold out his 25% package.
Alex Foxen and Chance Kornuth have also sold out, so if you're looking for a sweat, your only option is Kristen Foxen, who's selling 10% at 1.02.
No other names have been announced yet, but most likely to join that foursome will be England’s Stephen Chidwick, fresh off his runaway Purple Jacket victory at the Poker Masters. One win, four cashes, and $1,109,000 in prize money mean that the $300k SHRB buy-in shouldn’t be an issue.
Justin Bonomo is another almost-certainty. Not only did Bonomo bag the $5 million first prize at SHRB IV in 2018, but he also took down the Macau version that same year, as well as the 2020 online “pandemic” version hosted by partypoker. Jonathan Jaffe may also be tempted to pony up the monster buy-in, having scooped the final Poker Masters event for a whopping $756,000.
It will be interesting to see if newcomer to the high-stakes MTT scene, Vladas Tamasauskas, fancies taking a seat in the nosebleed tournament. The young Lithuanian scooped two titles and a further final table cash at the Masters for more than $500k in prize money and showed he certainly has the game to take on the best.
All eyes on numbers at Aria Las Vegas
The 2017 event, SHRB III, won by Christoph Vogelsang, boasted a record 56 entries. Negreanu’s win last year was over a field of just 24 players, though even that was up on Addammo’s 2021 win in a field of 21.
Should there be close to 30 entries this weekend, then the total prize money handed out in the eight official SHRBs will top $100 million - and that’s the kind of statistic that gets the attention of the biggest and best players in the world.
PokerGO will be streaming all three days of Super High Roller Bowl VIII and we’ll be bringing you all the best of the action here on our news pages, so be sure to check in regularly.
Below is a full list of the various SHRB events and winners held since the event’s inception in 2015. If it looks like more than seven, you'd be right. Only the events held at the Aria are numbered. All tournaments below are played at the Aria unless otherwise stated.
Super High Roller Bowl results
| 2015 | Brian Rast | $7,525,000 |
| 2016 | Rainer Kempe | $5,000,000 |
| 2017 | Christoph Vogelsang | $6,000,000 |
| 2018 | Justin Bonomo | $4,823,077 (Macau) |
| 2018 | Justin Bonomo | $5,000,000 |
| 2018 | Isaac Haxton | $3,672,000 |
| 2019 | Cary Katz | $2,610,317 (London) |
| 2019 | Daniel Dvoress | $4,080,000 (Bahamas) |
| 2020 | Timothy Adams | $1,446,112 (Australia) |
| 2020 | Timothy Adams | $3,600,000 (Sochi) |
Feature image courtesy of PokerGO
