Quote:
Originally Posted by ReliableSource
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.
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.