Oh, to be Daniel Negreanu.

There he is on Twitter, poker face put away for the night, dancing half naked in a gay bar in North Carolina with a gorgeous ex-girlfriend.

Life is a straight flush for Kid Poker.

Not to mention, he just added $63,647 to his $30 million in tournament earnings, tops in history.

You know you’re doing just fine when $63,647 — for sixth place in an Asheville, N.C. tourney — is petty cash.

Best of all, Daniel Negreanu, 41, is living the dream of every all-Canadian boy who ever grew up in North York:

“The idea of owning a piece of an NHL team is the coolest thing ever,” he tells me while cracking open a deck at Real Sports bar near the ACC. He’s in town for a PokerStars party.

The hockey team? Not the Leafs, his boyhood heroes, but the Las Vegas Rat Pack, in Sin City, where he now lives and plies his trade.

Rat Pack? That’s what Negreanu would call ’em. Rat Pack, as in Frank Sinatra and company. But there’ll be the usual name contest.

Unless you are a Habs fan and have been drunk since the Tampa Bay series, you know Las Vegas is a shoo-in for an expansion team, likely in 2017. The decision could come as early as September.

“99.9%,” says Negreanu. Like three aces and a flush draw. Bet the farm.

The big money belongs to billionaire Bill Foley, but Negreanu will buy a slice when the franchise is granted. Already, he’s a face of the team and headlined Foley’s ticket drive

“I’ll be at every game,” vows Negreanu, “and maybe have a hockey talk show of my own. Right now, the focus is on getting the team.”

Your read, Kid Poker?

“I just don’t see it not happening. We have a solid owner, an arena (nearing completion on the Strip with 17,500 seats for hockey) and we sold 13,000 season tickets.

“Vegas has 2.2 million people. It’s a sports town. We’ve been starving for a professional franchise of any kind for many years.”

True, Super Bowl Sunday in Vegas is the next best thing to being at the actual game.

But hockey? In a desert? Where it was 25C last February? Where a hat-trick is something David Copperfield does? Where hooking is perfectly legal?

“People say there’s no hockey culture in Vegas,” replies Kid Poker. “They said the same about San Jose — and now San Jose is Sharks Town.

“Nobody puts on a party or a show better than Vegas. Even people who don’t really love hockey will go for the atmosphere and then we’ll explain what is happening (in the game). They’ll come to understand it.”

Meantime, Kid Poker figures the bright lights and light taxes of Las Vegas will draw free agents who wince at the very thought of Winnipeg or Edmonton.

“It won’t take us as long to build a winner as people think. I’d bet on the playoffs in four or five years.”

Imagine, too, all those fans in wintry towns like ours eager to combine a weekend binge with a hockey game. The Hangover on ice. I mean, who plans a dirty weekend trip to Columbus?

Speaking of flops, I almost forgot. As promised last week, I faced Kid Poker heads up across a card table at Real Sports. Mano a bozo.

The early advantage was mine. Negreanu arrived straight from the airport after missing an early flight out of North Carolina. Like I said, there was that shindig with his ex and her fiance at the gay bar — Negreanu is notoriously hetero — after a post-tournament dinner at a vegan restaurant, plus he bumped into supermodel Kate Upton, who was masquerading as “Norma.”

You know how it is.

Never a dull moment for a multimillionaire vegan, TV star, part-time life coach, chairman of a new all-poker network ... and budding hockey tycoon.

“But I’m still a poker player,” he says — and I go down in flames.

Second hand, after the flop, he holds two aces and a diamond flush draw. I sweat a pair of eights and a higher diamond flush draw.

Kid Poker goes all-in. Old Man River calls.

“Actually, you played that right,” he tells me, melting my heart. “You got a chance.”

Sadly, the turn is wrong and the river is dry. I’m bust.

Oh, for the eight of diamonds.

Strobel’s column usually runs Monday to Thursday. mike.strobel@sunmedia.ca