I don't think he's sacrificing EV, a player like you are describing would have the results of Tony Cousineau or Allen Kessler

Hellmuth believes that he is the best holdem tournament poker player ever. He has said it many times.

He also believes that he can be the best tournament player of any game ever. In recent years, he has been pointing out the fact that he has recently been winning non-holdem tournaments.

But Hellmuth has never said that he is the best all around player. He has only said that he is the best holdem tournament player and that he can be the best all around tournament player.

His main definition of tournament greatness is the number of titles not the money or profits. This belief in combination with his belief that he is the best holdem tournament player and can be the best all around tournament player gives him a very narrow and focused line of action that once combined with his talents, experience, and skills gives him maximum congruence towards a clearly defined end and clearly defined paths towards that end.

This maximizes the placebo effect of his beliefs in terms of real life results.

SOOOOO this

Does he even Gin Rummy?

Everyone knows Daniel can't beat NL200 and if you think he can you're a dumb idio --- oh wait, wrong thread.

Lol good one made me chuckle

Wow that's soo deep on soo many Levels

Maybe so few people buy into it because those who do mostly go busto while the rest suffer from survivorship bias.

If his stats for percentage of cashes resulting in FTs and bracelets were achieved online, someone would post a graph and NVG would demand an investigation.

Nah, they'd just lol at the sample size. How many WSOP events can he have played in his life? A few hundred?

How much money did Phil make investors by scamming them last night?

About three fiddy.

Yes. I think he understands tournament meta game exceptionally well. People analyze his hands in a vacuum without regard to those sort of things. Making -EV plays to reduce your variance so he can continue to exploit his edge in the meta game and other soft skills is probably his secret sauce.

He needs to start selling white magic powder, to make millions....

The problem is that today if you’re not GTO optimal and using solvers, “you suck”. Only Most elite and cutting-edge no limit hold em players that play super high roller are good. This is what the masses now believe because of the way poker is now being covered in the mainstream. There is no in between - it’s almost like people actually believe That Phil doesn’t use range analysis he doesn’t understand odds he doesn’t read well he doesn’t have instincts and he hasn’t seen hundreds of thousands of hands, been pressure tested under the high stakes situations etcetc I could go on and on. He’s a world class player that “looks bad” against only genius wonks who are on a whole other planet.

I think Phil doesn't get enough credit for playing well versus amateurs and bad regs, and in particular inducing them to play bad. Even Jungle folded trips or whatever which was way outside GTO because "phil never bluffs this". Except he was bluffing.

If you look at the HU of bracelet 15, he induced his opponent to never raise pre basically, for example his opponent checked KTs vs a limp. This is because Phil "could be trapping" by limping big hands, but actually he induced an enormous mistake because Phil was limping everything, and therefore you absolutely need to raise there. This mistake is also compounded by his opponent's enormously weak play postflop with marginal hands. That is, he identified a serious mistake by his opponent, and then compounded that mistake by eg. trying to see more flops when his opponent has a wide range.

It is self evident to any thinking player that whenever Phil is showing you cards, he is trying to manipulate your image of his play. However, it is actually working. This explains why later he is able to shift gears open some random junk on the button. That would be an awful play in a vacuum, but if you have manipulated your opponents into folding suited connectors/1gappers and suited aces instead of resteal jamming them 20bb deep (because "phil isn't bluffing"), then you are obviously printing money.

The other thing I would say is sometimes when Phil advertises a "bad" play, it reminds me of an old cardcounting cover play about standing on 16 vs a T at the top of the shoe. Here, you "advertised" that you were clearly a bad player (because everyone knows 16 is a hit) for a very low cost, because equities run much closer than people think between those two decisions. People aren't giving Phil enough credit that he knows that the play is bad (by GTO standards), and that is why he is advertising it.

Really good post. I don't know if Hellmuth always knows that some of his plays are bad, but it reminded me of a hand he played this year, where he limped KK and lost. He posted the hand on twitter and, of course, people commented how bad of a play it was. Hellmuth must have known he was going to get criticized for it, but he still advertised the hand, as if to say : "Look, I'm limping KK."

The biggest con job Hellmuth did is to make people believe he's a tight player. He isn't. He plays a loft of hands most people wouldn't play and can be really aggressive in some situations.

He’s probably played more than that in the last 7 years alone.

Probably around 600. Small sample size, but we can only go with what we have. Considering this, his numbers are impressive.

Let's say :

600 tournaments
133 Cashes
58 Final Tables
25 heads-up
15 wins


He's above what we should expect in every category.

60% win in heads-up
Going to heads 37% of the time when he reaches the FT.
Going to the FT 44% of the time when he reaches the money.
Probably around 20% cashes depending how many tournaments he played.

But I guess your stance is that we can't discuss live tournament players because none of them has a big enough sample size?

If he is just lucky, or the achievement is nothing special....

Answer me this. Why is nobody, out of the other millions of people who have played WSOP games over the years, anywhere close to having that many bracelets?

If you were to plot it on a graph, it would like like that potripper one, with a single dot, miles from anyone else.

CONGRATS TO THE GOAT

love em or hate him

to deny his accomplishments is just plain childish

You need much less sample size in live than online, especially when it comes to players (like Hellmuth) who are superior at reading tells and also superior at influencing people's behaviors and emotions with words, demeanor and motions.

Tells and the ability to influence people's emotions and therefore behaviors to one's liking can lower variance considerably. For instance, let's take the extreme example of me noticing that a particular player picks his nose 100% of the time he over bet bluffs all in when the stacks are super deep. Then there would be zero variance in this particular maximum profit situation event for me. This is an extreme example. But Hellmuth probably sees tons of lesser tells that if accumulated can lower variance over time.

Online, the only info Hellmuth would have would be frequencies and ranges in terms of hands voluntarily played, c-betting, double or tripling barreling, etc. But live, a highly perceptive tell reader like him could just find a one tell tat could override all historical frequencies.

Now, you accumulate all of these tells and many instances in which Hellmuth would be "setting up" many opponents with conditioning plays and language, and you have cut down variance considerably. Hence, cutting down sample size to perhaps as little as a tenth compared to if he just depended on frequencies and ranges that show up in HUD.

Remember, poker is a game of imperfect information. A single instance of a person picking his nose 100% of the time that he pure bluff bets $1,000 into a $100 pot on the river turns it into chess. If I played chess against Kasparov, you wouldn't even need an entire game as the sample size to conclude that I stand no chance in the long run. In fact, just the first ten moves would be enough of a sample size to have 100% certainty that Kasparov has infinite EV over me.

In short, the people that say Hellmuth does not have a big enough sample size are idiot nerds who think that ranges and frequencies that are recorded in HUD are the entire universe. They have been infected by their own cognitive biases and so have their opinions.

There is a live meta to these weaker field tourneys that gives him an edge. He is an old fashioned leveler. If he just sat down quietly at the start of each tournament and played his style with no antics, he would have some bracelets, but not nearly as many. Is this really a stretch in logic? I don’t see him as an aberration of survivorship statistics, given the added complexity of live poker with weak fields. Lets just let him be him and agree he earned his bracelets.

Yep, that's the graph I couldn't find. Is that Mike Leah top left?

People who bring his results as the proof that he is good is not a good argument to people that believe he is lucky. He would have those results if he was the luckiest poker player. And someone must be the luckiest poker player on the planet.