Mike "The Mouth" Matusow has bet half his bankroll on Daniel Negreanu to beat Doug Polk in their upcoming heads up match.
He tweeted about his bet, begging Negreanu not to let him "go bust again." It also revealed that half his bankroll isn't quite the monster bet one might, at first, have imagined.
“Well I did it!" the tweet reads. "I bet 10k of my 20k bankroll on [Negreanu] getting 4 to 1 vs [Polk]. I would of bet it all but needed 6k for bills on nov. 1st. [...] Let’s go [Daniel] don’t let me go bust again!”
"The Mouth" and "The Kid"
Matusow seems an unlikely fan of DNegs in an election year. The two have had ongoing Twitter acrimony over each other's vocal and opposite views on U.S. politics.
But the old guard seem to like Daniel Negreanu's chances. Or at least they like his chances better than the market, which is offering as high as 5.25 to 1. At 52 years old, Matusow runs with the greying pack.
With the Negreanu-Polk showdown coming in a week's time, other players are getting their side bets in ASAP. Phil Hellmuth got his money in early at 4 to 1 on Daniel. Matusow got the same odds for his $10k.
Matusow has a reputation for gambling hard. Constantly and publicly broke, he is viewed by many in the poker world as a poster child for problem gambling. But he's a devil at the table — especially at Omaha Eight, the game in which he specializes. As a result, he can normally sell enough of himself to stay in the game.
What he earns at the table tends to disappear on sports betting, as evidenced by the fact that he has almost $10 million in live poker earnings, and his current bankroll is $20 thousand.
Heads up 4 rollz
Apart from putting his friend under a lot of pressure. Matusow has also revealed his almost terrifyingly lax attitude to bankroll management.
His bills of $6k are coming out of his $20k roll. Anyone will tell you that you should never use your rent money to gamble.
Even if Matusow things Negreanu has a substantial edge, half your bankroll at 4 to 1 is way outside the Kelly criteria. That's $10k that will probably be tied up in this bet for a month at least, maybe three or four.
And that doesn’t include the pasting it looks like Matusow might take on his $5k pro-Trump bet. The bookies have Trump at only slightly better odds than they have Negreanu at the moment.
Doug Polk jokingly pushed Matusow to bet bigger and go harder. Polk tweeted “[...] you are really going to leave the other 10k on the sideline?”
