KidPoker

You can tell if you lose this pot,

you can tell the people back home you got unlucky,

otherwise you'd have won this tournament for sure.

Okay.

Shoot, that's a bad flop for you.

Boy. Now he needs a queen, ace or a ten.

Everything but.

He's in.

-Good cash, anyway, right? -Yeah.

Not everybody cashes in the EPT Grand Final in Monaco.

-That's right. -And you just did.

When you think of poker, most people think of Daniel Negreanu.

We knew that he was always going to be a winner.

There was just something about him.

When I met Daniel he was already a legend.

Six bracelets, two WPT titles.

His understanding of the game is peerless.

Daniel is clearly the best

tournament poker player in the world.

He's seen poker

in all of its different incarnations

in the past 20 years and

he's still talking up a storm while doing it.

I can't even imagine what kind of legacy he'll have in the game.

He crushes it.

My brother wrote his own rules.

He went through a phase where his ego ran riot.

Daniel made bad decisions. He ended up having to start over.

Daniel was super-driven, very outspoken.

Very opinionated. That's what we love about him.

-Universally loved. -He's usually right.

I can't think of too many people who've done more for the game of poker today.

He's never turned anybody down when they needed him.

I think Daniel Negreanu is the most notable,

most recognised, most famous poker player...

in the world.

KIDPOKER

Subrip: Pix

This is where I started.

It's been so long since I've been here.

To be honest with you, when the whole thing came calling

as I turned 40, it didn't really sink in. I mean, I expected it, I'm not gonna lie.

Like, I figured that if I wasn't inducted, what exactly do I gotta do

to get in this thing then?

So it wasn't a shock.

It didn't really sink in, till I was up there

and shared what I wanted to share.

And went through the journey in my head of how it all started.

I was born in 1974 in Toronto, Canada.

Both my parents are from Romania.

They came to Canada in about 1967 with five dollars in their pocket

and really just worked their way up.

They started, like, doing candy floss at the exhibition.

But my dad was an electrician. Started to work in the electrical department.

Then they started to buy houses and rent them out,

and speculate and all that kind of stuff.

They did a great job of creating an upper middle-class life

from essentially nothing.

My dad knew very little English. He knew, in Romanian,

you say, "I'm gonna do something," you say, "Okay, fuck." Right?

So he would have, like, these moments where he'd be working for someone,

and the lady would say, "Okay, I need you to do this." And he'd say, "Okay, fuck."

And he would keep saying... Eventually, she's like, "Why do you keep saying that?"

And he's like... He didn't get that was a bad word in English.

True story!

He almost got in a big fight, when the husband came home.

"Why do you want to fuck my wife?!"

My childhood, I would describe it as

typical European-style childhood.

My mother, she cooked, she cleaned, she was sweet.

She fed everybody.

You came over to the house, you're like, "I'm not hungry, I'm good."

She'd put a plate of food in front of you and make you eat it.

My dad was always filling your cup, make sure you had a drink.

Very hospitable, very loving.

I would say more on the liberal side. Open.

You know, they talked about whatever in front of me.

We just had a perfect, loving family.

-Get that? -Yeah.

My parents were selfless.

They both loved me and my brother more than, you know,

anyone could imagine and they were great role models.

My mum, just that generous, selfless heart,

of just giving.

She'd been through a lot in her life. She had nine miscarriages.

She had five boys, four girls.

Finally, my brother and me.

It's one of the reasons I think that she was so smothering and spoiling.

Cos she just cherished us so much more,

because of all she suffered to go through to just have us.

And my dad was like my best friend.

We'd watch TV late.

I'd pretend to fall asleep so he'd carry me up to my bed.

Now it starts to scratch?

He taught me how to be hospitable and generous.

My dad was just that guy.

If we had a party and there was somebody who wasn't having fun,

my dad could sense it. He would make a joke.

Crack a joke with them, liven up the mood.

And I feel like I got a lot of those traits from my father.

I think of other people and the rough childhoods they've had,

and I was really blessed.

Well, at school I was a bit of a know-it-all and a bit of a...

When people would fight me, I didn't care how big they were, I would fight back.

Maybe some might consider him a brat.

A troublemaker. I don't know if it was because

he was always a smaller kid,

so he had to prove that, he was heard.

My brother always knew that I had his back.

So he'd let his mouth get him in trouble.

When I was in the first grade, Mike was in the sixth grade.

He was six foot tall already. He was really a big kid.

It's actually part of the reason I have a big mouth.

He's the big protector guy and he would absolutely take a bullet for me.

There were numerous times when I would have to like

settle his battles for him

or just let people know that Daniel has a bigger brother.

I was a small guy. I'd fight for myself but having my brother as back-up

certainly made it easier.

The truth is, I was actually really cocky.

My teachers actually... they shouldn't have liked me,

but I think they did like me and appreciate me.

Often, I would come to class with a pillow.

My brother found class so boring.

He stood up from his desk, walked to the back of the class,

laid on the floor and went to sleep.

And the teacher says, "You can't do that."

Well, he goes, "I'm tired. This is boring."

Structure for my brother wasn't

on his priority list.

He did things when he wanted to do things.

And... it was always difficult for him to follow the rules.

I was a tough kid. There's a letter my mum got me for my birthday

a few years ago from when I was ten years old.

And it reads... This is, like, five days into school,

cos it starts on September 6th.

"Dear Mrs Negreanu, I am writing as a follow up to my telephone conversation

with you Tuesday, September 11, 1984.

I want it clearly understood that I will not tolerate

Daniel's poor manners or behaviour.

In light of your own position to always support and excuse Daniel,

I will have no option but to remove him from school

should he continue to ignore the school rules."

I love that one!

It was so funny, cos that's what she was.

"It wasn't Daniel's fault, couldn't be."

School wasn't easy for him.

We couldn't figure out why.

We later found out that he looked at things in a different way.

I think Daniel's just misunderstood,

because, instead of thinking in the box,

he was drawing his own lines and his lines were a lot bigger than that box.

So they put him in gifted math class,

to accelerate his desire to learn.

I was always a numbers geek and it was just very fun for me to look at numbers.

When I was a kid and I used to play video games...

I'd play a baseball game or something, and I wrote down the stats.

I kept logs of it, so I knew like, you know,

three for 11 is 372... or 373, pardon me!

I total believe that my brother was never challenged enough in school.

He found things to be boring all the time.

He always wanted to find out, "What's next?"

Sometimes I'd just sit there with my mother going,

"What are we going to do with him?"

He doesn't listen. He does what he wants, but yet,

everything he does he excels and does well.

How are you supposed to discipline someone for always doing well?

By the time I was in high school, I actually did really well.

But then I started to, you know, go down the other path.

I was going to the pool halls with my friends Regev and Oren.

Oren and Regev are essentially like my brothers.

We grew up in Toronto, you know, becoming men and doing all kinds of bad stuff.

Trouble? Us? Never. We were really nice.

We got in trouble.

-I asked like that. -My God!

In about two seconds, he did nothing.

What did you do that for?

I thought you wanted everything.

No, his hair, not his eyebrows!

-Hey, man! Look at my eyebrow! -It's cool.

Daniel, you trust me so far.

Oren and Regev?

Brothers from another mother.

We were always like the clowns of the class, making everybody laugh.

He was the entertainer of the group, by far.

But tomorrow I'll be better. Tomorrow, you'll look the same.

You know, it was all about just having fun.

Not doing bad stuff, but just doing funny stuff.

We didn't really like school.

Unfortunately, the pool hall was really close to school.

So it made it really easy for us, before we could even drive, to make that trip.

It was a place to hang out.

After school or on the weekends, evenings,

they would just go congregate and play billiards.

And he got really good at playing snooker.

And he made some money on that felt as well.

We were gambling for five bucks and drink

and, you know, the table charge, so it wasn't like big gambling,

but it was where I was entered into that world where I met

some people who played poker and I sort of got introduced to it.