I remember the post, and I think about it any time this hand shows up (which is often, as I'll watch the entire DVD set for auld lang syne from time to time).

Here is the hand:


So the telling moment (according to Phillips) is the moment when Tony D looks at his cards before folding.

Pause the video at 2:53 at the moment when Tony reaches for his cards. He uses his left hand to peek, and his empty right hand to shield. But when it switches to the hole card cam a second later, we see Tony's right hand has about 15 chips in it. So clearly, that shot came from a different moment. Oddly, at no time in the action does Tony D hold any chips in his right hand, and he always uses his left to put in his calling chips.

Furthermore, after Hellmuth bet, he went into his usual hand-over-mouth pose. But in that hole cam view (2:54), you can see Hellmuth fiddling with his chip stacks in the background. As I recall, we never get a hole cam view of Phil's cards, either.

ESPN has always taken some liberties with its editing. Greg Raymer mentioned something about a reaction shot of his wife coming from an entirely different moment at the table. When Grant Hinkle won his $1,500 bracelet back in 2008, the telecast showed the same reaction shot of his mother on several occasions. Not a similar one, I mean the exact shot used twice. Of course, this is standard for movies and TV but it's odd for "sports" coverage.

My relatively uneducated guess is that Tony DID have JT, and that hole cam shot was an edit from much earlier in the hand. Hellmuth failed to show his cards to the camera so ESPN sent a producer to ask him what his cards were in order to add the chyron to the broadcast. Hellmuth said 77 because he didn't want to give up anything about the way he plays.

Maybe it's just nostalgia or retrospect, but if you can get past the bad play, it was somehow really good TV. I remember how glued to my TV I was when it first came out, and even watching it now, it's pretty engaging.

Oh **** Mark Gregorich was right there! I'll ask him later if he's ever heard about this conspiracy theory.