Daniel Negreanu arranged an interesting matchup between late-20s local tournament phenom Jeremy Becker, and young social media poker pro Landon Tice.
Both are among the few prominent young guys in the game of poker nowadays, which has become a game of olds due to a lack of new young players since 2011's Black Friday.
Jeremy is absolutely crushing daily events around Vegas, winning one seemingly every day. I'm not even kidding. He has had the best run over the past year or so of any daily event players in history. These don't show up in his Hendon Mob, but he also seems to be doing fairly well at more competitive events. Here's his Hendon Mob: https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/pla...p?a=r&n=504737
Landon Tice is 24 years old, and burst onto the poker media social media scene by putting himself out there. At first he was the guy helping prepare timestamps and descriptions of Joey Ingram's show -- a position he volunteered to take for no money. He then befriended Joey and other known players, and started to get mentions on social media. He won a few tournaments, and even more attention was brought to him by his older friends he had gotten to know. Eventually Matt Berkey took him on as one of the Solve For Why coaches, and he's also a co-host on Berkey's Only Friends show.
I actually think well of both of these guys. Jeremy seems humble and easygoing, though I don't know him well. Landon showed surprising maturity last year when a bunch of idiots on Twitter were piling on me last year, and he remarked that they should look at my overall contributions to the community, rather than one thing they didn't like. Keep in mind Landon and I were never friends, so I appreciated that a lot.
Anyway, Daniel Negreanu set up a "match" between them involving their 2024 WSOP results. They are agreeing to play a minimum of 25 events together, and are crossbooking their results. (This means they add up Landon's cashes in those events and separately Jeremy's cashes, and the one with the lesser number pays the difference between the two.)
However, Tice and Becker are not part of this bet directly. Jeremy's side is being backed by Negreanu, and Landon's is being backed by Berkey. It is not clear what Landon/Jeremy are getting out of this, aside from publicity.
There is some debate which of these guys is a favorite to win.
Landon is trained by Matt Berkey, with tools used in Berkey's Solve for Why course.
Jeremy claims he "doesn't own a computer" and apparently does not use these training tools.
However, it seems Jeremy probably has more natural poker ability, and is the hotter hand at the moment. Some have said Jeremy can crush dailies but won't be able to compete at the WSOP, but that's not true. For example, he cashed at the 2023 Main, with a semi-deep 305th place finish. He had 4 other WSOP cashes in '23, including one at the tough $5k NL event. He won a $800 Venetian event in September for $48k.
Landon impressively finished 5th at the WSOP $25k Heads Up event (obviously backed by Berkey) in 2023.
Here is Landon:
Here is Jeremy: