Daniel Negreanu won his eighth WSOP bracelet on Thursday, taking down the $100,000 High Roller Pot-Limit Omaha for $2,257,718. It's his second bracelet in three years, the biggest PLO buy-in on the 2026 schedule, and by his own math, proof he's finally clawed his way out of tier two.
It's also the tournament almost nobody saw, which we'll get to.
A win in his best game
Negreanu has been telling anyone who'll listen that PLO is his game now. Two years ago he snapped an 11-year bracelet drought by winning the $50K Poker Players Championship, a mixed-game grind soaked in prestige. This one is different. This is the game he says was built for him.
"I don't study the game with solvers or anything, because, frankly, I don't need to, because the game makes sense to me. I eat it, I breathe it, I sleep it. I'm in the moments, I play by feel," he said afterward.
Coming from most players, that's the kind of line that ages badly. Coming from someone who just beat an 83-entry $100K field, it lands. He's cashed six of the seven PLO events he's played this summer. The self-assessment: "I've always said that I'm at the top of tier 2, but I might have elevated myself to the bottom of tier 1 now."
The prize ranks as the fourth-largest cash of his career and roughly doubles what the 2024 PPC paid, though that one came with bragging rights money can't buy.
The final that deserved a stream
The field drew 83 entries, down from 121 the year before, but the money was real: $2.25 million up top out of a payout ladder that paid third-place finisher Christopher Frank over a million.
Negreanu returned for the final day second in chips among four and immediately gave half his stack away. Then he found a gear. He spun a short-ish stack into the chip lead and, at one point after Philip Sternheimer busted, held better than 2:1 on the table.
Artur Martirosian wasn't going quietly. The Russian, who'd already won the $25K High Roller in No-Limit this summer and owns three Triton PLO titles, is nobody's idea of an easy out in this game. He won a big pot to grab the lead back, held it for about the length of a coffee break, then watched Frank double before busting him. Martirosian started heads-up with nearly twice Negreanu's chips.
It didn't matter. Negreanu came straight back and never really let go. He shoved all-in on one hand and revealed later it was pure air. "I had dust," he said. Another version he gave the media desk: "He didn't see a couple of the hands, but I promise you, I had nada."
Frank was the story of the final three regardless of where he finished. Negreanu the showman, Martirosian the stoic technician, Frank the livewire playing every hand like it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. "I love watching you play," Negreanu told him after one double. "You're so dramatic." Frank gave a thumbs up and took another long pull of what was allegedly coffee. If it was coffee, he'd had enough.
Amanda called it
Negreanu's wife Amanda watched from a rail that grew two and three deep as word spread that DNegs was deep in a bracelet event. She was unusually relaxed for it.
"I used to get much more nervous. This time for some reason I feel calm about it. Usually I'm a crazy person with nerves, and if he's losing a pot I'm kicking shit," she said. "When he's in the zone he's really in the zone and locked in. And he's locked in right now."
He was. On the final hand Negreanu flopped the wheel and didn't even clock it at first. By the turn it was academic, the rail surged forward, and he finally caught up to his own good news. "Let's go!"
Even Phil Hellmuth, making one of his signature Main Event entrances a few tables over, couldn't pull the crowd. Someone asked Negreanu to get Hellmuth on the vlog. "I'm busy winning," he said.
The one thing that went wrong
Here's the frustrating part. This wasn't streamed. The biggest PLO buy-in of the year, Negreanu chasing an eighth bracelet, and two of the best PLO players alive going heads-up for it, and it played out in front of a rail two deep instead of the whole poker world.
It was a scheduling casualty. The WSOP stream had gone dark the day before, and with ESPN's first Main Event broadcast of the year kicking off, nobody wanted a competing feed. Understandable. Still a shame. Negreanu, for his part, loved the timing anyway: "It was pretty cool to do it on Day 1 of the Main because of the energy. The crowd was pretty much into it. It was rows deep in that rail."
The win throws Negreanu back into the Player of the Year conversation, which he's not going to talk himself out of. "That's always a possibility. You never give up. I'm a big Rocky guy and boxing's a great analogy. You keep getting punched in the face and you keep getting knocked down, but the champions are the ones who keep getting up."
One more line worth keeping: he's still never lost a heads-up PLO match. Martirosian apparently said the same about himself before Thursday. Only one of them walked out with the streak intact.
$100K High Roller PLO final table
- Daniel Negreanu: $2,257,718
- Artur Martirosian: $1,477,434
- Christopher Frank: $1,002,107
- Philip Sternheimer: $705,448
- Yosuke Miki: $516,160
- Sean Winter: $393,139
- Sergio Martinez Gonzalez: $312,233
- Jeremy Ausmus: $259,047
- Robert Cowen: $224,962
