[pokergripes]

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So now you have a very smart and skilled player who's getting a chance to play the best at their best games... imagine what he can learn from this...

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I'm doing my best to imagine and all I can imagine is "damn, there must have been a way to learn whatever it is I'm learning for less than half a million bucks a pop."

I like your enthusiasm though. It sounds like nothing daniel does could ever be -EV.

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There is a surprising amount of truth in your last sentence IMO...I believe there are, in fact, a handful of "personal poker brands" forming around a few of these guys (PH is another example), where the promotional value for their "personal brands" will outweigh pretty much any negative expectation they could possibly face in a poker game.

For example, assume (just for sake of illustration) that DN was a 55-45 underdog in each of these HU challenges from a EV perspective (setting aside variance relative to his bank roll, which presumably he took into account in setting the $500k dollar amount, and he would know how deep he is).

Next, assume that he's getting some money from the Wynn in a promotional deal (which seems likely from all the discussion), even if it's not $3 mil per year, or over a very small number of years. Say it's $300k per year, again just for illustration. But I think you've also got to assume that the Wynn wouldn't enter into that kind of deal without a termination right of some kind relating to quality of his services, or some specified set of things he has to do and/or achieve, or both. So, it seems safe to assume that him just quietly sitting in the 10-20 blind nlh game, or the 40-80 lhe game, isn't going to cut it for him to pick up that e.g. $300k per year of "free money" (in the sense that it's like a free roll tourney, not that his time is free).

Now, assume that he can pick up meaningful incremental revenues from website advertising. Hard to quantify, but presumably these guys are getting enough money out of it to make it worth their while to bother working out advertising deals, etc.

And that's before you even get to the question of whether he can make huge money by, e.g., owning a piece of a poker website that gets bought up in the future at a big multiple, or from writing books, or becoming a tv announcer for the ever-increasing number of media channels adding poker, etc.

How -EV would he possibly have to be in the HU games to make him -EV in the "meta game" (if you will) of the "DN brand"?