For what it's worth, DEFCON 5 is normal peace time.

Well in that case you can't claim that to come late is theoretically better than being there on time. Even if you play big stacks badly. It may be better for image or stamina reasons but there are plenty of simple strategies that lose but do better than folding every hand.

i bet you if hellmuth put out an open offer to buy half his wsop main action for 250k
someone in this world will buy it

How much would you bet [?]

As that clearly is not an offer that would ever be taken by any backers

As it's too big an amount for the vast majority - and so at such a crazy mark up, you haven't got enough potential people able to afford to make the deal, to find the one person [if there was one] that wanted to back him at that mark up

Crazy mark up works if people are buying small parts

If you are buying big parts, 5%+, then you would get a 'better deal'

Just as if you are shopping, usually if you buy a bigger box of cornflakes you get each flake for less than if you buy a smaller packed

Chino has done this.

The most common scam is where they just collect the $$ and don't even play in the event. Seems like there's a thread about it every WSOP. At least Chino put some effort in

This is hilarious.... and pathetic.

Professional poker player is a fancy word for HUSTLER. Can anyone tell me the difference between hustling a card game and hustling off the table? What about hustling someone at props while at the table? Or hustling someone on a sports bet while at the table? Or on the golf course? Etc etc etc. There is no ****ing difference. The old school guys know it and so does seiver and berkey.

We all know Phil is a pos... well so is every other professional poker player! They're all hustlers, it doesn't matter if they see themselves that way or not. The moral outrage from those two is just hilarious. I would bet this has nothing to do with protecting those helpless, innocent investors lol and everything to do with protecting their egos/ self image.

Wake up boys, there is no gamblers code, rulebook, morals etc etc. It's a dog eat dog world and somebody's upset over a needle / they can't do what Phil does. Let's not anyone forget that Scott and Berkey are from the same cloth- they're kissing ass, sucking dick, and playing up to all the whales/fish in their games trying to get paid just like that pos Phil is.

he showed up on time to 10k turbo bounty. twitter won?

White magic now stands for "responsibility".

Lmao. If I lived in the time zone where Sunday Million starts at 3 AM and wanted to play an anniversary edition, I'd just go to bed at 6 PM in a room with good isolation from noise, and I'd set the alarm clock for 2:30 to avoid registering 1 blind level late, let alone being blinded out.

We're talking about that game where you try and trick your opponents out of their money, right? "Poker?"

Whiners.

It's actually really hard to go to bed at 6pm if your not used to it.

Showing up late would obviously be a betrayal of his 'fiduciary duty' to shareholders. I don't think anyone would fail to recognize the point if he no-showed, and blinding off for a large percentage of your stack is not materially different.

Whether it's something that'll be pursued legally - i doubt it, but if you had all affected parties pooling their resources for legal costs and it could be proven that he routinely blinded off 20% of his stack before showing up i think (depending on who hears the case) they'd have a good argument for compensation.

Even conservative estimates for the value of his buy ins assuming that he cashes in 1/5 tournaments (implying total buyins are 5x the total value of buy ins observed) he's spending around 2-3m a year these days.

Hard to say with a high degree of confidence since there're a lot of super high rollers mixed in that dominate the results (and we'll never know how many of them he's actually played in) but he could easily be down over the past several years based on his own action and possibly down lifetime.

You don't suffer from a sleep disorder.

For people unfamiliar with capitalism, selling a financial product its not like selling a $9 coke at a hockey game. Financial products are heavily regulated and when advertising returns on your money, it becomes fraud when those returns are grossly unrealistic, as in this case. No one has an ROI that can justify a 1.8 markup for this field regardless if they're not showing up late or whatever.

Its possible Phil was/is deluded enough to actually believe he's around 100% ROI and I'm sure he had something like that in the nineties, so I don't think we need to go into "die scumbag" mode, but we can still do a little self-policing without all the complaining about the complaining.

i would pay 1.8 for world class white magic

>25% of the total amount he cashed for in 6 years came from a $1m tourney in which he most definitely had <10% of himself.

I´m only guessing here, but chances are he didn´t even make money over those six years. I´d like my chances if only the total buy-ins count, but he most definitely lost money if you factor in travel costs etc. Now obviously he may have been freerolling some tourneys from sponsorhips or favourable backing arrangements, making the tournaments profitable for him, but that doesn´t mean that the same tournaments were profitable for those who invested in him.

$22,000,000 in total cashes over >30 years may sound impressive to some, but I´m guessing that many, many college graduates actually made the same amount of money in the same time frame if you only factor in actual net profit.

The second group is no diff than people suggesting a stock is overpriced or that a particular automobile costs too much. We don’t have to all be like Trump and blame opinions we don’t like on “haters” - I mean we aren’t 12 years old are we?

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone that thinks Phil is giving his investors a good value in that event. But according to you I guess no one allowed to say so without them being “haters and losers.” Nice to see that people like you appreciate a robust debate.

Another merit for Hellmuth is he's doing this out in the open where it can be scrutinized and made known.

Selling a stake in a tournament isn't even close to certified professionals who're put in a position of trust dealing with peoples life savings promising unrealistic returns to collect fat commissions.

The world is filled with marked up products/services where people pay huge (often unjustifiable) premiums for a brand. Phil is that brand. The price is fair game. Showing up several hours late is not. It's misleading to people who would have bought it with the reasonable (and justifiable) assumption that he'd actually be playing the tournament from start to finish.

If he's somehow getting people to fork over thousands of dollars without at any point saying any lies like "This is a good investment" or "My ROI is greater than 80%" or "I'm going to win more money than you are giving me," then sure. That's somewhat stretching my own credulity, but to each their own, especially considering he already does that in the scant Tweets quoted in OP.

Lol at people who buy Hellmuth's schtick. For poker players, you people are truly terrible at seeing through the most transparent facades imaginable. "Oh that Hellmuth, he's not purposefully superusing, he just is so delusional that he thinks he can actually see the other player's hole cards through his own talent!"

"If someone sells you snakeoil for $1,000, that just means snakeoil is worth $1,000. Logic!"

HUD programs are perfectly legal and publicly available tools that anyone and everyone is welcome to use. If you're playing baseball without a glove, it doesn't mean your opponents are cheating.

Seating scripts are cheating because they were deemed unhealthy for the game and so are banned from use. Some sites have made a similar decision regarding HUDs, and using a HUD on those sites would also be cheating.

Lol, if you think the difference between teammates and opponents is merely semantics, then the little league coach analogies can really get absurd.

"If murder is so bad, why don't you do it? This logic totally makes sense."

Other than one snarky comment about getting the SEC involved, no one has said anything about reporting Hellmuth to the authorities or revoking anyone's "rights" in the matter. If someone calls your nan a ****, do you look for legal precedence before determining that person's an *******?

The only question here is how pedantic your definition of lying or inflating results is. His presentation of his results is the equivalent of someone filtering their database for "Finished ITM" and then presenting that as their results. So if that doesn't fall under your definition of inflating results, then sure, he's being perfectly open and honest.

This is of course assuming that the purpose of a share selling agreement is to milk your investor for all they're worth, and not, ya know, to come to a mutually beneficial agreement.


Does that pretty much cover everything? Or do I have to quote all of the dozens and dozens of people who think that scams cannot possibly exist on a free market because all markets are perfectly efficient?

Even if we assumed Hellmuth was the best player in the field, charging 1.8 MU and describing it as a winning investment is ludicrous.

A reasonable rate for the best player in the field would be something like 1.15.

So, Helmuth is charging >5 times as much MU as the best player in the field should expect.

Proper price is probably $0.70.

It's gambling, not an "investment", just like everything else in poker seen through the eyes of a recreational player.

TBH you guys are hypocrites. He hustled someone off the felt in order to stay in action, while people like you hustle people on the felt. Are you encouraging fish not to play in your games or telling them how to play better? I don't think so. A hustle is a hustle.