No one is saying he isn’t great at donkaments. But come on he would be decimated in even 50 dollar buyin events online, let alone online high rollers, and we haven’t even gotten to super high rollers.

How can a guy that is only good at one particular tournament format be considered the goat tournament player? He is the goat donkament wsop player, I will say that.

Lol

Not a hater, but it would be interesting to look at win % as a function of wins vs. events entered.

Suspect he might be behind some people like Mercier, Alaei, Rast, and Deeb.

And that's with the advantage of playing all the micro fields of the 90s/early 00s, which account for a significant chunk of his wins.

POY and bracelets are a bankroll competition as much as anything. Play the most events, win the most events.

Not the poker GOAT for me, but probably still the live MTT GOAT when you factor in longevity and volume, even if there are many players with higher peak skill.

I like how nobody itt puts him in the same league as live tournament crushers of the past 2 decades. You guys admit that fundamentally he isn’t in the same ball park. Buttt…he did accumulate a lot of WSOP bracelets when fields were much smaller and weaker (1989-2003)…and WSOP bracelets are like unicorns to you guys for some reason.

Stephen Chidwick almost doubled up on PH in live MTT winnings and also won a **** ton online. But PH is better because he has a way of “navigating” soft WSOP hold ‘em fields.

I would really like to hear from you about these players that beat huge fields multiple times .
Also define big field/ small field as it seems to matter much to you (which is weird since chidwick moslty plays the smallest field there are) .

You keep missing the “soft” part.

Is the tournaments Chidwick plays filled with sharks or fish?

The gap between him and second place (7) is a HOF career in its self. The high rollers are full of top tier superstars no doubt but talk about small fields. the 250,000 this year had about 70 entries. My dumbass would win it once every 150/200 times in a simulation. His cash game skills are weak compared to the big crushers no doubt but tournament poker is his jam and he's been winning them for over 30 years.

He’s earned wsop goat, but to say he’s the tourney end boss goat is reaching.

mostly shark.
So now your metric isn't field anymore , it's just quality of the field , I see.
Finally some metric we can't argue.
Oh well, you win.
It's funny that PH doesn't play these high roller much, he ran like a god in the one he played. (prolly the pros were in vacation).

Man you really hate the guy )

It drives me nuts that you guys put so much importance on events that reward bracelets. It’s just a ****ing tournament. There’s tournaments with tougher fields around the world and online. I get it winning a bracelet was good for marketing in the past. Nobody remembers who wins the main event anymore.

-RS

So you argue that nobody cares about who wins the ME anymore but people should care about who beats tougher fields?

I don't even understand why anyone would want to play in tougher lineups if they have access to easier ones.

I’m not making that argument at all.

It’s my opinion that guys like Chidwick (possibly Seidal, Negreanu, and Juanda) already have more impressive live tournament resumes. Im just naming a few…

If you guys want to argue PH has the greatest hold’em WSOP resume in the months of June/July I’ll bow out now. Lol you guys win.

Hellmuth in mix in 10K PLO8. What a boss

If you wanna play that game how many online players share cards / chip dump / multi accounted etc.

Hellmuth winning more bracelets is great. Proof is the tears of all the salty haters in this thread.

He is about to cash again in a 10k field non NL game. You love to see it

Chidwick has certainly come closer to perfect play than has Phil. But if the GOAT is the person who has achieved the highest level of ability, then in every game the GOAT is usually just the person who is #1 right now.

That's totally reasonable IMO, but it's also kind of boring and leaves little to discuss GOAT wise. Like, the 2023 Heat are greater than the showtime Lakers and there are 1,000 guitar players on Instagram right now who are greater than EVH.

JFC you really are stupid. Again, 9 Bracelets from 89-03 and eight from 04-23.

Maybe he’ll even get his 18th in another day if not within another two years. Then Whats the excuse? 50% in smaller fields compared to the larger ones, then what when he gets 19th?

He’s the absolute best open event tourney player of all time at the WSOP. It’s not even close clown troll.

How good is Chidwick at mixed? I don't recall seeing him in anything besides maybe one tournament

1/ WSOP is the most prestigious poker series when it comes to public perception, like f.e. the olympics.
The WSOP bracelet is the marketing thing linked to the most prestigious poker series, like f.e. gold medals.

Are number of gold medals in the olympics a good proxy for skill? Yes.
Will it be an absolute skill predictor (meaning, who has more gold medals in sport or event x, is better)? Hell no.

What do people remember more, who is the GOAT or who has the most gold medals?

2/ A part of skill that you are totally not taking into account, is performing under pressure and executing a win. There are armies of sports psychologists these days for athletes so they can perform under pressure. I think PH was naturally highly gifted at this and was probably also trained on it once it became a known thing.

3/ There aren't much WSOP statistics that you can come up with that don't put PH at the top 5. In most he will be number 1. If he isn't number 1 in the WSOP, who the hell is?
Like, show me potential WSOP statistics where PH wouldn't be considered a top contender?
When people talk about the greatest olympians ever, they will not talk about the most talented guy that ever participated that didn't win a medal, the discussion will be focused around insane results and repeat medal wins.


If you can accept that WSOP and WSOP bracelets is seen as "something different" within poker due to its history, prestige, etc, I think you can accept that PH is number 1.


My challenge to you:
If you can accept that live tournaments and online tournaments are a wildly different thing and require different skills, please make your argument why Phil Hellmuth shouldn't be considered if anyone would ever try to make a list of greatest live tournament players ever? Show me your argument. I'm not saying number 1. Lets say why should he not be considered for top 10 or top 50?

Arrrgh, dude, enough with the 1989-2003 era. No one disputes that more than half of Hellmuth's bracelets (nine) were won during that span. After all, even if we all agree that only wins from 2004 to present are worth a damn, it's also true that Hellmuth has had eight in that period. You cited Seidel, Negreanu and Juanda among those who have a better record. Yet post-Moneymaker, Seidel has three, Negreanu has four (plus a WSOPC ring) and Juanda has two.

The funny thing is that I absolutely agree with your larger point: if you broaden the scope to tournaments beyond the WSOP, Hellmuth's record is relatively pedestrian. He famously had almost nothing to speak of on the EPT, but that can be explained away by saying he didn't tend to travel to those. However, Hellmuth was also criticized for having a modest record on the WPT, despite playing in his share of those events. His WPT history largely supported the notion – which you and I seem to share – that Hellmuth has less success in more "lean and mean" fields.

Someone else in this thread already made a sports analogy, so I'll attempt one, oddly in a sport I don't know that well: Hellmuth is sort of like Miroslav Klose, the all-time leading scorer in FIFA World Cup history with 16 goals.

Is that a lofty achievement? Sure, that feat puts him atop a list of many of the sport's all-time greats, ahead of Ronaldo (15), Muller (14), Messi (13), Pele (12), among many more.

Does it anoint Klose with GOAT status? Well, no. The World Cup is certainly a high-profile stage, but it's merely one area of the soccer/football zeitgeist. More to the point, it features a different overall field of opponents compared to, say, the UEFA Champions League, where Klose objectively does not have nearly the CV. (Klose has 14 goals there, not even in the top 50, and way behind Cristiano Ronaldo's 140 and Messi's 129.) It's probably why Klose is on no one's list of all-time 10 or 20 greatest footballers.

And yeah, it's a weird exercise to cherry pick one stat from a team sport as a basis of comparison to poker, which is a solely individual competition to anyone not named JJProdigy. Plus, Hellmuth's 17 bracelets (or eight in the post-boom era) would be more akin to Klose leading the World Cup leaderboard with 25 rather than 16. Phil's total is not just the most, it's the most by a wide, wide margin.

But Klose's World Cup record represents a reasonable analog to your larger argument – that is, the WSOP is just a fraction of a poker tournament resume, and not necessarily the best measure of that player's overall abilities and prowess.

TL;DR You're making plenty of good points, and there are plenty of arguments to refute the idea of Hellmuth being the GOAT tourney player ever. So stop doubling down on the one shitty one.

Why are anti-Hellmuth people always ignoring the fact that the players Hellmuth played against back in pre year 2000 were the best players in the world at the time? As if whatever happened back then should be ignored because the game has improved over 20 years. The fields were basically the small field super high rollers of today in terms of competition. There was nothing higher or more difficult to play.

Its no doubt the same morons who say Pele is not even a contender for GOAT because the 60s version Pele wouldnt get into the bottom sides of the PL in today's game. Or the poker version, the people lamenting "waah if I had played back in the 80s I would be winning the WSOP, those players back then wouldnt beat my Big 3.30 on Stars today". How braindead do you have to be to have this inability to assess achievements across different time periods?

Yeh I hate when people say the fields were so soft - that's with any sport from past decades, and in 20 years they may say lol how soft games were in 2020. If they were so soft there would be of been a number of dominant players winning yet there's just Hellmuth - hmmm. Hellmuth is the GOAT in tourny poker due to longevity alone - to be consistent over decades is insane and rarely do we see that in any sport. There's also a specific skill set to navigating live tournaments - most of your opponents are highly exploitable so you need to play highly exploitable as well rather than "GTO" or whatever top players use these days. ReliableSource is an idiot.

How many WSOP tourneys has Phil entered all in all?

Let's agree that they might have more impressive tournament resumes by your standards.

Let's also agree that you're using a different standard than the vast majority of other people in poker. That's OK.

calling poker a sport is lol but your overall point is correct. To be fair it took way less work back then to be good at poker. There were a lot of players back then who would have 3-5 6 big scores every year for a long time who still play a ton of events that totally fell off the map around black friday.Then went from winning piles to pounding out min cashes. Helmuth to his credit has been able to continue doing well when poker has changed so much. While Helmuth was the most dominant tournament player back then, there were a lot of players back then who had success who can't win now bc games absolutely were way softer if you just played tight solid poker back then. If he had fallen off the map like so many others it would be fair to say "lol 8 bracelts but they're all from when everyone sucked" but he didn't.

It's really hard to be successful at something for a long time, especially something that has a lot of luck involved and then to not be able to have success the same way you always have done things. It's easy to chalk it up to bad luck for a couple of years, rather than realizing you aren't good enough anymore. It's already easier to learn the younger you are, but to have years of doing things a certain way and then having to change those ways take a ton of self reflection and effort. Very few guys in poker were able to do that.