As the $200/$400 heads-up no-limit hold'em match between Doug Polk and Daniel Negreanu got rolling, the latter looked every bit the feisty underdog of his big-screen hero Rocky.
Negreanu had dominated Polk in the opening 200 hands played live in Las Vegas, and he'd followed up with competitive results across the first nine sessions. Less than a buy-in separated the two at that point.
What's followed has been three sessions of Polk building stack after stack, accumulating more than $500,000 in winnings. The online heads-up specialist once known as arguably the world's finest in the format looks much the part.