Went over your head twice it seems!

Hi Everyone:

What most people may be missing is that in big tournaments the ability to beat bad players out of a lot of chips is quite important. For example, if you can get a bad player to call an all-in for a lot of chips with a hand that has no business making this call, that can make up for a lot of other mistakes that you may make and should also allow you to move all-in with a hand that may not warrant that much action.

On the other hand, when in a medium to high stakes cash game, this ability may mean little since most of the players you'll be against won't make this kind of mistake. Now, if your overall strategy is flawed in other ways, it can be exposed. So the answer to this question has something to do with what skill sets you're looking at.

Best wishes,
Mason

This

Life is overrated

with some practice i would guess hellmuth wins up to 5nl and negreanu up to 25nl.

Technically speaking, being able to beat 200NL zoom or even being profitable at low stakes online mtts is indeed a serious skills indicator as it requires an up to date strategy + a soldid comprehension of the post-modern game fundamentals.
Therefore, eventhough the stakes arent big enough for them, it still shows that they are, in a vacuum, not ahead of 20$ ABI online grinders regarding the technical aspects of the game.
Though, you are right when you say that specializing in 1tabling live donkaments gave them some amazing reading abilities they were able to capitalize on during their lengthy carreer.

question should be who is.worse

clearly PH bc #bracelets is the only accurate measurement

I am going to say that both are amazing tournament players who can do very well in large fields. DN has been making a lot of effort to learn the newly found NLHE knowledge (solvers, GTO etc.) and I think he's fundamentally better now. PH makes it look like he is fundamentally unsound, but I doubt he's as bad as this thread makes it out to be. In many ways, I think it's a great asset for him, as people underestimate.

For example, see Doug Polk vs. PH's HU match. I watched the whole thing and I think PH played very well and Doug mentioned that he didn't expect him to play like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7p5_fhvJ9s

Both players probably break even in live FR cash today and I doubt they have a lot of experience online HU, so they probably won't fare well against online HU elite.

Upswing did a nice piece on Hellmuth's return on investment at the WSOP: https://upswingpoker.com/how-good-is...llmuth-really/

tl;dr version - it's very impressive, and probably even more so when you factor in that apparently he didn't actually play in as many events as they estimated he did. The sample size obviously isn't enormous, but it is pretty decent for a live pro and is over a LOT of years.

Hellmuth I think is also pretty good at exploiting his image in certain spots; I remember the final table of the WSOP Europe Main Event in 2012 (which he won), where was making all sorts of crazy bluffs (plus some pretty sick hero calls), just running over the table. Esfandiari on commentary was just completely taken aback, said he'd never seen Hellmuth play like that before. This isn't to claim that Hellmuth has sound fundamentals or anything, he def doesn't, but he clearly does the exploitative thing very well for these big donkaments.

Negreanu seems to play a lot more consistently the same way. I think he's fixed a lot of the preflop leaks he had back in the day, but is probs still too loose/passive. These days it seems like he largely sticks to the high rollers, where the fields are smaller & the variance likely even bigger, so it's pretty tough to get a solid handle on where he's at. He's a big winner over a 5 year period (https://fullcontactpoker.com/year-end-results/), but a huge chunk of that is because of the second place finish in the 2014 One Drop, where he had about 50% of himself.

I saw that final table too. That final table was juicy as hell and he had position on the biggest fish. His fundamentals are so bad when facing good players but he does do very well against less experienced recs. They didn't know how to combat a highly exploitable strat he employed and got punished for it. Beating up on fish is a definitely a skill, no doubt about that, and if he made a lot of money doing that then good for him.

Also I'll say his game selection in donkaments is pretty good. He doesn't pay the higher stakes and/or reg infested games very often because he knows he is a dog there. That takes some discipline, certainly for someone with an ego as big as Phil. The HSP/PAD cashgame episodes were just sad and he really got pwned there like a fish in a barrel, but that's a different story.

DN should definitely take an example and move down from stakes that he definitely cannot beat. Those millions of cashes don't matter much when he buys in for millions, and even he himself said at certain years he was down while amassing a huge amount of cashes.

Dnegs vs White Magic at writing books and teaching?

Mmasherdog already said that hellmuth is basically a fish, while dnegs plays at least make sense

daniel because he always tells you what hand you have and then calls and loses anyway so if he busts the $1000000 buy in I can just sue him for chip dumping and get rich that way

You take two of the top 20 players in the world and then describe them as TERRIBLE.
It doesnt get to much funnier than That.

Saying they are top 20 is offensive to the actual top 20. And if you think they are top 20 that means poker isn't dead yet.

Well they are top 20 in money earned and in braclets won so Ide like to know what measuring stick you are using ?
The ONLY Thing I could say about money earned is that it has become diluted in that those guys buy into many games with Huge prizes that have buy in amounts out of the reach of most guys.

Well first of all you didn't specify whether you meant top 20 in cash game or tournaments. If you meant cash game, or overall, then the discussion is already over.

When it comes to tournaments, I sure as heck don't use a metric that allows someone to play high buy ins and high volume without even having to be profitable to be #1. Some of the best players in the world play maybe two tournaments a year. Also if you just watch them play and you have a sound knowledge of the game you can just see they aren't that good.

It's like sitting in a 1/3 live game, you don't need a big sample of hands to determine these aren't good players. When you see them making tons of mistakes that's all you need to know.

I wish I had one tenth of DNs or PHs money that they earned being "BAD" poker players.

+1

First of all, to imply that either of these guys wouldn't crush $1-$3 is just silly.

Second, Tournament Poker and Cash game poker are really two diferent disciplines. It has long been known that they require a different skill set and different techniques, and that many players who are talented at one form do not do as well at the other. Heck, McEvoy and Cloutier talk about it in some of the earliest decent poker books ever published. Or maybe it was Brunson in Super System, I'm not sure. I know I read about it years and years ago.

Just look at Letherass, who only has two cashes for less than 30k in his hendon page. Should we assume that he has no skills, based on the fact that he doesn't do well in Tournaments, or play them very often? To me this is the same as criticizing Mo Salah by saying he can't break 10 seconds in a 100 meter dash. Maybe the game is passing them by as they become middle-aged. But do we mock Jesse Owens because he never broke 10 seconds either?

To anyone who would suggest that these guys are not among the very best tournament players of all time (with over $60 million in cashes and over 100 major titles between them,) I would say that you have to be pretty dense to hold that opinion. And that it's probably not worth arguing about, since the person saying it would be motivated by jealousy, petulance or stupidity; good luck overcoming that with anything as weak as common sense, logic, or empirical evidence.

First I didn't imply they don't beat 1/3. You just want to read that.

Second, I just pointed out that if you were to talk about the cash category they don't even come in the top 1000 and if you consider the tournament category I use a different metric than "live time cashes".

And if you look at Phil's play and still think he is super duper good then you're "dense". Or just as horrible as he is, and more likely a combination of both. Keep playing poker, thanks. And you're right, not worth arguing about. Don't bother replying.

I wish I was as horrible at tournament poker as Phil Helmuth. Alas, I am only bad enough to have won over 130 times online, plus two outright wins and about 15 other cashes from 60 live tournaments. And, yes, I've been called a fish or other names a thousand times, usually by guys whose chips I am stacking.

PS if you look at Helmuths play and don't see how he goes about his business so successfully, take another look. He does everything he does for a reason, and his methods obviously work, as much as they don't look like what other people think he should be doing.

DN isn't an idiot, so him.

Hellmuth is better but HU Dnegs would win. /thread