My goodness some people really don't have any clue do they.

I'll make it extremely easy for you: He gets two cards, so do others. His two cards make better hands. More pots == more wins.

Jamie Gold won a tournament with over 6000 players. Do you consider him the best player that was playing that tournament that year?

Jamie Gold's reaction never gets old.

It was either BJ Nemeth or Jess Welman, but someone referred to Hellmuth's snap-shove as an "electrocution hand" on PokerRoad Radio years ago. He shoots up like someone tased him in the ass.

Can someone who knows how to post videos please post the hand where he got eliminated from the Heads-Up Championship by Annette Obrestad. On You Tube,...Title is: Annette_15 busts Helmuth... terrible call! EGO!

did you actually watch that program and see how bad the structure was?

...sample size....variance....

I flipped a coin twice today. It landed on heads both times. Heads must be more likely to hit, obviously. /s

thank god for Gus Hansen.

I will explain the calculation behind this, although I am not sure why I am bothering. I see the stream of dismissive, trying to look clever, posts from you on just about every thread, and I doubt if you are even really interested in the maths, but maybe others are, so here goes.

The calculation I did was to look at the probability of Hellmuth making heads up N times, of all the times that he made it into the money in Vegas WSOP bracelet events, if he was average in ability among the remaining players (ie ignore the difficulty of making it into the money, and just look at the probability of reaching heads-up from that point).

By "taking account of field size", I mean that if 20 players make the money, an average player has a 0.1 chance of making heads-up - if 50 make the money, he has a 0.04 chance etc.

I worked out the weighted average of such probabilities, and fed it into a binomial "at least" formula, to approximate the odds of him making heads up at least once, twice, three times etc. See here for one of many explanations of this well known piece of maths:

http://onlinestatbook.com/2/probability/binomial.html

The numbers I listed are what came out of my spreadsheet for at least 5, at least 6, etc. The numbers rise very quickly as you will see (or as anyone who has done such calculations will know), but the basic aim is to show how ridiculous the suggestion is that his extreme success is largely down to variance.

I don't have the spreadsheet - it went when I replaced my laptop - and I don't feel the need to recreate it, but that explanation should be enough to allow anyone else as anal as me to do so.

By the way, I am not going to get into one of the verbal jousting matches that you are so fond of. I will leave your anticipated smart comeback unanswered.

Why do you think a binomial distribution is representative of the probability of a player in the money of a tournament to make it to HU play?

Is this just an elaborate 'every hand is 50/50' troll?

You use pretty good english so I'm having trouble believing that you're actually that incompetent

also

is not showing your work lol

No, he gets two cards, his opponent gets two cards, they act on three streets, Hellmuth checks in the dark and outplays them all and win the championship.

There's a reason why Jamie Gold won the main event and never win a tournament again and why Hellmuth won the main event and won another TWELVE bracelets.

If this is supposed to be serious then you have my sincere pity sir.

So you are saying that PH is such a tremendously good player that his wins are completely due to his ability to dominate every poker player on earth?

Ok, since your reply is not the usual one-liner put down, I will try once more.

For a series of N events, each of which has probability P of success, the binomial distribution tells you the chances of S successes from those N events. Variations of it tell you the probability of "at least" S successes etc, as explained in the link I gave.

In this case, the events are the times when Hellmuth made it past the bubble, and P is the probability of a player with average skill of the remaining players making it to heads-up. AS P would be different for each of the 95 events, I approximated it by using a weighted average value (not a straight mean, which would skew it).

It is the opposite - trying to show that the results are far too extreme to be realistically explained by chance.

I have an honours degree in Maths from Cambridge (England), so the rubbish I post is educated rubbish.

I told you my spreadsheet got lost. The time-consuming bit was counting the results from Hellmuth's Hendon stats. I have provided enough explanation that anyone who studied senior school maths could easily repeat it.

Just to elaborate on what this means, you can illustrate it by imagining that the same 100 people made the money each time. If one of them got to heads-up 5 times it would be ahead of expectation, but not that remarkable, because you would expect about 7 to do that well (100/14). Similarly, you would expect roughly 2 of them to make heads-up 6 times or more (100/53) etc. As you can see, going from 8 times to 9 the chances get about 19 times smaller, and the multipliers each time are getting larger. It is very unlikely that one of these 100 players would make it 8 times or more. For one of these players to make it 17 times is more unlikely than picking a particular star at random in the Milky Way (not an exaggeration), and Hellmuth made it 22 times. What a luckbox!

There is a degree of arbitrariness in how you've calculated your results, though. Why is reaching HU an appropriate metric of a player's skill? And clearly, picking your sample as US WSOP - a sample which even the biggest PH fanboy would admit he's run very well in - is borderline disingenuous.

Also, I'd suggest that any pre-2008 results ought to be disregarded as poker was ridiculously soft back then (honestly, I could pick any date between 2006 and 2012 for that, 2008 is just a number plucked out of thin air).

the generic point that seems to be missed is that good players are still capable of playing badly for whatever reason.

if someone does something stupid against me I usually sharkscope them the vast majority of the time they show up to be a fish occasionally its a decent player with a sophisticated play and very rarely but it happens its a decent player with a decent record but the hand was played terrible no matter how you try to look at it.

the assumption that good players can never play badly and bad players can never play well is some what spurious.

I have seen a number of recordings of plays from Phil in which there is just no way to spin it or justify it, it was simply bad play.

this shows that he played bad on those occasions not that he always plays bad.

regardless how people want to spin it his success speaks for itself.

I doubt he is the worlds best and I cant vouch for if he is or is not better then all the posters here, but you cant rationally cast him aside as a bad player when he has had the success that he has enjoyed.

You are absolutely right. I chose to look at his WSOP record of closing in from the bubble to heads-up because I noticed that his ability to do that was astonishing. I could have picked a subset of results, such as post-2008, or his "golden years", and come up with different results, but the simplest and least controversial seemed to be to look at the lot, including recent years where his form has been more patchy.

The pre-2008 point is too subjective a debate to be easily resolved. Many of the games were smaller, but full of old-time live pros, so they were no walk in the park. If any of us were transported back then, armed with the theory that we know know, we would probably do well, but Hellmuth did not have that theoretical ammunition either (possibly still doesn't ).

Phil Hellmuth, the undisputed G.O.A.T. of tournament pokers. Suck it haterz.

It is not only about poker skills, how many of this broke online fpp pros can take pressure of big money in pot, jealous telltalers and photoshops of them riding giant hotdog?

Not sure whats worse, his play or his table talk "I wouldnt play QT this good would I?"