Seems to me if Hellmuth had Chip Reeses attitude or whatever, he could indeed be considered the greatest of all time.

Unique style, good results etc

There are the awful televised cashgame plays of course to contend with

Need a better analogy. Floyd had 13 stoppages in his first 15 fights and was a killer at 130lbs. Continual hand injuries began around fight 15 and even so, he still had 7 stoppages in his next 12. Brittle hands and moving up weight classes turned him into more a of a defensive point-scoring wizard. Great fighter, trash human.

How did phill won 2 mil online last year, thats what hes claiming, where? Which site?

Just finished off the No Gamble No Future podcast .. Not bad, a bit of he said/she said in a few spots, but not as nasty as some have made it out to be IMO. GL

Would not be surprised if he just added up all the pots he won together and the aggregated result was 2 mil. He lives in his strange tournament world.

Hendon Mob style, he did not say how much he lost...

if he was playing private games on pokerbros against those Silicon Valley types, it's not out of the question that he actually won that amount. as bad as he is at cash games, those dudes are worst.

Are the businessmen really worse than Hellmuth at this point though? Especially in online cash?

I think people way too often let their opinion of Hellmuth personally infect their view of his place as the Tournament GOAT.

Obviously, cash is different than tournaments, so let's just leave the discussion to tournaments.

No one else comes close to his WSOP accomplishments.
And so you're left with people always trying to find ways to belittle those them.

But even after you TRY do that,
You still have to deal with the fact no one else is even close.
Why is that?
So, that's gotta count for something doesnt it?

People say they "could do" things all the time, but if they dont actually do them, who gives a F? It's literally playground talk of 9 year olds, "I could climb to the top of the tree, I just dont wanna right now"

You may claim others COULD have gotten his numbers, but fact is, no one HAS. Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda.

They say possession is 9/10ths the law.
Well, possessing all the bracelets and endless runner-ups . . . "Tournament GOAT" is his title to lose, and quite frankly, no one else is close

I find all the posts of people refusing to give the guy credit for what is right there in front of them quite funny.

We get it, you dont like Phil, and you're determined to slam him despite evidence.

Now, has Phil ever claimed to be the GOAT as cash?
If so, then you have an issue you can jump on, but no one really ever says that since it's pretty much impossible to quantify cash game results over a lifetime and over endless unknown sessions that are not recorded. If all the top guys played every day under "Live at the Bike" conditions for 30 years, we might have something to discuss.

If defined by greatest career in tournament poker, I think there can be no doubt that Mr. Hellmuth is the very definition of a professional tournament poker player.

I don't believe highest win rate or roi is the proper measure here. If we had ready access to these numbers, I could be persuaded otherwise, but the fact is were are kinda stuck with what we got.

Phil it is.

Have you ever seen an interview with him?

He clearly thinks he is the best in any format.

There are more tourneys than just WSOP. Hellmuth is the WSOP goat. But that's far from what he claims to be in every interview. He actually truly believes that he is one of the current best nlhe (and other games) players out there. This obviously is not the case and there's no shame in that. There are a lot of people out there studying nlhe with great tools over thousands of hours. It should not be a surprise to anyone, including Hellmuth, that he is not going to be anywhere near the best player by talking over occasional hands with Brandon Cantu and Mike Matusow. And honestly he's rich and has a family and other commitments. No one expects him to want to spend all that boring study time. He obviously is a great player in comparison to his average competition he is playing against. He just isn't a great player compared to the best players out there. Honestly it's been pretty entertaining seeing Negreanu call him out on some of this stuff. Phil tries to use being up a couple million in rich silicon valley games or winning a couple 100 hand hu sng's as evidence of him being the best nlhe player when they are pretty much meaningless. In reality it's Hellmuth who is doing the playground talk. He claims he can hang with the best but he never fires any high rollers outside of the occasional one with huge whales that he can get his rich friends to freeroll him into. Look how quickly he backed out of the 25k Aria high roller bet he started to make with Negreanu. In reality we don't even know what Hellmuth's actual WSOP results are. He fires a full schedule every summer and it wouldn't be that surprising if his ROI isn't that great over his entire sample of live tournaments. We'll never know the actual accurate results picture though because he's never going to share it.

A little off topic but still part of the PH/DN discussion. It's seems that a lot of the 'well known' Pros basically ignore the WPT, which includes a lot of them who made huge 'first' scores in the first 5-7 seasons.

Not sure if it was a conflict with sponsors, no appearance perks or something else. Yes, they would play the LA or Vegas events but it certainly would've gone a long way to show that they could beat smaller, but not too small, of fields with a much higher percentage of skill per player. GL

Hellmuth has a huge ROI in the WSOP. Not sure about other tournaments. He has to have to have won so much. Polk mentioned that in one of his videos.

I don't know if he knows much GTO solver stuff at all. He has made many basic mistakes playing short stacked in tournaments, never mind his NLHE cash game. He also made basic technical mistakes in limit games tournaments he won or finished in top places. Of course, his strength was always NLHE tournaments.

He obviously has really good skills against amateurs and weak pros in big tournaments. I don't know if he still has such a big edge now though.

Iirc helmuth had an appearance on Ingram's pod and they talked about how some 2p2 guys backtracked his wsop results and calculated an roi and found he just absolutely crushed it

I looked for the thread in question but never found it

I think it was in a Doug Polk upswing article. DN is going to crush him nevertheless. All of these old school players are given far too much credit.

I'd love to see Phill's ROI in WSOP .. AAANNNDDD let's eliminate the PPC and One Drop please. Yes, those were/are WSOP events but the One Drop scores really shouldn't be allowed to offset the other more traditional tournament stats. Yes, one bink in the ME will give you a huge burst as well, but 'let's' break it down by BI levels.

While Phil doesn't go rebuy crazy like DNegs does in some I'm not so sure that either of them turn a profit at the Series despite cashing 10-15 times plus per year. Interesting stats for sure and Phil's WILL NOT be available since he doesn't have a VLOG like DNegs does. GL

It was discussed on Upswing. PH has to have a huge ROI at the WSOP to have won all that. The buyins cannot possibly be anywhere near the wins.

Why can't the buyins possibly be anywhere near the wins?

Specifically, why can't the buyins possibly be more than the wins?

Lifetime ROI isn't really what we are looking for anyways. I would imagine his lifetime ROI at wsop is solid. Would be more interested to see his ROI over the last 10-15 years when there started being a lot of people actively trying to improve at the game.

Because math.

By my quick, back-of-the-envelop estimate, he has won over $11 Million at the WSOP from 2006-2019. That's only the traditional WSOP in Vegas BTW, no Euro or circuit events.

Even if you wanted to discount his 3 cashed in the "One Drop" events, he has *only* won about $7.5 Mil

I'm pretty sure you could have bought into EVERY SINGLE EVENT held over those 14 years and not have spent anywhere near that amount.

Taking the last regular WSOP as a guide (2019) and trying to come up with a practical schedule: even if you played 25 events, bought into every single $10K event (14), plus the $25K high roller, plus 10 more $2-5K tourneys, you'd only have spent around $200K in buy-ins. And in 2006, there were half as many events.

Phill used to dominate tables from front to back, using his personality besides his skills. He basically kept everyone in check, and told them what to do, like someone in the army.

Of course that stuff doesn't fly anymore.

Ryan Fee wrote the Upswing article - https://upswingpoker.com/how-good-is...llmuth-really/



Ryan Daut has also written about Hellmuth's ROI (I think he's covering the whole career, not just WSOP), and concludes:

https://steemit.com/poker/@daut44/an...er-tournaments


The difference in numbers comes from them looking at different time periods, WSOP vs all tourneys, and the imprecision of having to guesstimate stuff, but I would say some basic conclusions that could be drawn are: Phil is a lifetime winning player; he is much more profitable at WSOP than other tourneys, and his winrate has significantly declined over the years. None of which are surprising, but it's nice to see some data on it.

ty for sleuthing these out

Phil’s stats sure are fascinating. I guess there’s a lot that can be said for still being able to use your reputation/table presence to induce casual players into making bad decisions even when said casual players have become so literate in the relevant theory.