The pro-Hellmuth camp seems to be misunderstanding something -

Nobody is saying he's bad. We're simply saying that over the last decade he hasn't clearly been better than the other top 50 players in the world, and the stats bear that out.

You point to successes that nobody else would consider mentioning for anyone but Hellmuth. "He came 2nd in the $50k". Well Mizrachi won it twice.

That's the key - Hellmuth has his pre-boom stats added onto his current as expected results, no other current player has that.

He has 100 wsop cashes so unless fanboys say that he cashes >50% of the tourneys he plays on wsop, 500 wsop events played seem like a good guess as that will give an itm of 20% and most tournaments crushers have an itm of 10-20%. The last part is really more of an indicator of positive variance.

good point, is pretty much common knowledge that poker is a lot tougher now than it was in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s

that will be cool.

those stats are misleading especially the 50 final tables or whatever as most of his final tables came from events that only the last 2-3 tables cashed, and the 20 hu's he has reached is yet another argument that lady luck loves Mr. Phil Hellmuth, nobody has a big enough edge to reach HU 40% of the time when they make a final table, Not even Phil "GOAT" Hellmuth. If you don't believe me run some simulations and you will realize that in order for that figure to be truth you'll need an insane edge, which is not possible for shallow 10-30bb poker. Which brings up my next point.
Let's pretend that he somehow is good enough to reach HU 40% of the time when he reaches a final table, to win 13 of those or 65% of hu's is something that even the best HUSNGs players can't do. So besides being the GOAT of tournament poker he is also the GOAT of HUSNGs.

Just curious if over the last 10 years any other player has been top 2 in POY in b2b years?

I guess the very best HUSNG players can win 65% of husngs when playing deep no blind increasing husngs but thats not how wsop events work

POY is more or less an indicator of who ran the best in a wsop year.

There are flaws in this reasoning. You can't apply HUSNG expectation to the final two of the tournament. First of all, people that play HUSNG expect to play heads-up, while people who wind up heads-up in the tournament may be playing heads-up for the first time in their life. Secondly, you're assuming that Hellmuth and someone else are starting heads-up with even stacks. If Hellmuth really crushes final tables like the stats show, then he'll probably have a big chip advantage when it's down to 2.

from 2011 to current Hellmuth as finished
1st - 2 times (2.5k razz, WSOPE ME)
2nd - 4 times (10k stud8, 10k 2-7, 50k players championship, 1.5k razz)
4th - 2 times (10k horse, 1mil drop)
5th - 1 time (HU mtt)

he sucks. one game pony.

If anything he should have less chips than average when they reach HU as he would most likely play a tighter style(explains somewhat his 40% reached HU figure) or ran better than expectation and acummulated a ton of chips. Most HUSNGs players also play a lot of their volume vs people with little HU experience (game selection)

I don't think a "pro-Hellmuth camp" exists anywhere in the world other than maybe in Hellmuth's house and not even in his entire house at that. This is about what Hellmuth has accomplished during his lengthy career and people writing it off as luck, meaningless, etc. because they don't like him on a personal level despite most who have met him saying he is gracious. He's done well at the highest levels and I attribute that to some level of skill rather than the catch-all phrase "variance". I also have a recurring daydream where I'm at a major tournament, he insults me on live tv, and I break his nose so you can't put me in any nut-hugger category. Nothing personal, it's a zen trick I use to calm myself down after bad beats.

Or he could be getting to HU more often because he also started the final table with more chips?

As for HUSNGs, yes, there are obviously fish there, but still they at least knew they were getting into a HU game. In a tournament, you could have a complete novice who didn't expect to get that far, and wouldn't know the first thing about proper HU strategy.

Shouldn't we have fairly accurate and complete entry / results data AT LEAST going back to 2003? (Or is that something WSOP has never released?)

I'll ask it again: shouldn't it be pretty trivial to answer the simple question of whether or not PH has been better than other top tourney players since the 2003+ poker boom?

Same timeframe:

Bonomo 1-2-4-4-9
Ivey 1-2-3-5-7-8
Negreanu 1-1-2-2-4-5
Mercier 1-3-4-7-8-8-9-9-9
Selbst 1-1-4
Mizrachi 1-1-2-3-4-4-5-9

Those are the first players I looked up, again, not saying Hellmuth isn't a top player, merely saying that his results post-boom aren't better than others.

I don't get it....why can't you believe this?

bingo! Live results over ~500 tournaments are COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS when trying to discern between the ~300th best NLHE tourney player in the world and a top 10 NLHE tourney player. They literally should be IGNORED when trying to evaluate a live tourney player.


Nobody demanded anything. The only thing I said is:

If you are trying to discern how good a live MTT player is then his actual results are not one of the criteria I would look at.






You quoted my earlier post and said "exactly", but you aren't agreeing with me at all...you are using live tournament results to judge PH, which is the exact point I'm arguing against(you just happen to think those results paint a bad picture for Hellmuth)





http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/01/mtt-pros/

What hands have you seen him play or what insight into his game do you have that allows you to say this? What aspects of "small ball poker" is PH employing so well that others aren't? My hypothesis is that most of these types of posts come from the following process:

1. See PH's live tournament results
2. Invent a narrative to support those results

Look at the hands Hellmuth played against Davidi Kitai linked here: http://www.pokernews.com/news/2014/0...itai-18474.htm

All terribly played. I have no idea how does Hellmuth continously score deep runs in tournaments. He may be great against fish but good regs are crushing him.

He reads souls LDO.
Also, he dodges bullets.

And it took 167 posts for someone to tell the truth.
Must be a new NVG generation.

Hellmut is prob one of the best listeners in the game. If you speak he will know what color panties your wearing. Srs.

Almost every post in this thread is based on super high variance. Whenever a thread like this was started 2 years 90% of the posts would say Hellmuth sucked. Then after a couple of good years -- 90% of the posts say Hellmuth is great.

So even though all you guys are pretending you are discussing his whole 25 year career, you are really just talking about the last 2 years.

how many fishes/good regs do you think there were playing the 3k 6max? and the WSOPE ME?
what about the mixed games? full of fishes as well I guess?

This is a gem...so results are not a determination of how good a live MTT player is. Just wow.

nope

I take it you believe that expected EV is a better gauge of MTT players. Problem is, there's no reliable, generally accepted method for determining expected EV for PH and other long-term MTT players. At least one that I've read about - I'd be interested to learn of one.

In its absence, long term results are the best gauge we have. Variance precludes one from ranking the very best players using results, but results still carry more weight than the unsubstantiated suppositions of those used to the huge database that online results can provide.

expected EV