He is terrible top to bottom from basic pre flop to post flop. Like literally does not even know basic spots not to mention way too tight in general, yet loves to defend his bb with total trash like 85o. Yesterday flopped an opener ended on 12bb stack and was too scared to get it in vs mp on a low board, just flatted the cbet, and got lucky villain gave him a free card to hit the river.

You may be right, but his and Helmuth's running deep percentages appear to be high, albeit the sample is in live MTTs not online.

I have played against a number of players live who are technically poor in one of more areas but still winning players, and still difficult to win chips from.

They are certainly not as good as the top GTO players but they are good enough to make money using well thought out game selection.

This type of player also possesses some skills that are unquantifiable and are not in any coaching manual or within any solver.

helmuth has had way more success than MM

If mikes early tournament strategy is so good these days why doesn't he ever have a big stack?

You guys defending playing ability of these relics like Matusow and Hellmuth who have not improved since the end of the last millenium are so cute

Hellmuth has won 9 WSOP bracelets since "the end of the last millenium".

What's even cuter is the typical 2+2 poster dogma of "I swear I'm better than {insert pro's name here}, if I only had the bankroll beyond my 1/2 game to prove it".

Old school TAG dinosaurs will have a good ITM% in big NLHE fields because they are difficult to knock out, but they will obviously also often be one of the shorter stacks when running deep because of their playing style. Allen Kessler I would put in a similar bracket, although I think he has a bit more GTO knowhow than Helmuth and Matusow and plays shallow better than them when deep, but he doesn't posses the white magic that they do.

FYP

Isn't that how PH won those bracelets?

Mike's WSOP top 10 finishes from 2010-2019:

2019 - $10k Stud 8OB - 4th place, $116k
2018 - $10k Omaha 8OB - 4th place, $75k
2017 - $10k Limit 2-7 - 6th place, $35k
2017 - $10k 6-handed Dealer's Choice - 5th place, $59k
2017 - $10k Omaha Hi/Lo - 8th place, $37k
2013 - $5k Stud Hi/Lo - 1st place, $266k
2012 - $5k Omaha Hi/Lo - 8th place, $34k
2012 - $1.5k NLHE 6-max - 8th place, $40k

I'm not trying to prove a point. I'm just posting this for the sake of discussion. Seems like he is still a decent performer in mixed games? He's been making roughly one FT every year at the WSOP, albeit on what's probably a pretty heavy schedule with a high number of buy-ins.

I'm not saying I'd empty my bank account to stake him, but it seems like he might be a solid winner in the mixed games MTTs at the WSOP. He's a lightning rod for criticism because of his outspoken personality and the fact that his NLHE game is probably a bit antiquated, which sticks out since it's the variant that most players know best, where probably the biggest advances have occurred over the past 10-15 years.

I hate the term outspoken personality. Its used to hand wave his toxic, dog **** personality.

Whether he's bat **** crazy or not is separate from a conversation about his poker skills. I wouldn't hold him up as anyone's role model and I pretty much disagree with his hateful, paranoid right-wing ideology across the board, but that doesn't meant he's bad at poker. These are two different conversations.

I just wanted to point out that he's consistently been making final tables at the WSOP even if people are quick to criticize his process.

The guy was always delusional.

Mike getting 4bet by Chris Ferguson's deuces, losing to a set on the river, and proceeding to ***** about it for the next two orbits was hilarious. Happens around the 18 minute mark of last night's stream.

To be fair, that play was suuuuuuuuuuuuuper horrible. Raise and 3-bet in front of him and he shoves 22 as a short stack with zero fold equity, laying Mikey like 3 to 1 on a call.

Now obviously Mikey should have taken the possibility into consideration before making the 3-bet, but once we get there, the rest of the hand plays itself.

What´s funny however is how Mikey, after hitting on the turn only to get hit by a two-outer on the river, goes on and on and on about how he lost to a "2 percenter" and bitches like the clowns in chat talked him into making that play. The guy can't even figure out super basic math. WTF?

This is super common for his stream. His passing comments are almost always wrong.

"He only had 4 outs!" Nope it was 6
"He could only hit a K, J, or 8!" Nope also could hit a 9

I'm pretty certain he can't even count outs correctly anymore (well, I say anymore, it's possible he never could), much less have even the remotest clue as to what % chance those outs correspond to.

Also insanely results oriented to a degree I've rarely seen. He'll regularly go on tilt over coinflips b/c the run out favored him on the flop and turn only to lose on the river. He'll also justify a lot of his plays based on what the flop would have been had he not folded.

It’s truly incredible isn’t it. He’s as delusional about his skills as a micro player who says the nosebleed players are all fish, he just doesn’t have the money to battle them otherwise he’d crush them all!

Is he still winning with this style though? Even if it's a small ROI of say 10%.

If he's playing super nitty, protect your tournament life poker, but is good in a few key areas such as not paying off big value bets, not tilting, and playing at a consistent level throughout the comp, then he might still have a small edge on a big NLHE field that has a lot of dead money in it, despite him playing relatively poorly if he goes deep, e.g. being easy to exploit on the bubble, not pushing obvious small +Chip EV edges when he has <15BBs and generally not understanding ranges, or equity hand match ups, when short stacked and deep in the tournament.

He will still occasionally get dealt good cards deep in the comp and then run pure.

I know a player who plays exactly like this in live MTTs (£100 to £500 buy ins) who has a high cashing rate, about 20% but is nearly always short stacked when he gets down to the last two or three tables, so min or low cashes a lot, but occasionally he just goes on a card rack heater and gets Kings and Aces 3 out of 6 hands and finishes top 3.

This player rarely has to rebuy or re-enter because he plays so tight.

He doesn't even do that, he is weak when he should be loose and loose when he should be tight. He often makes awful river calls, and awful pre flop jams. He just busted today jamming ATo UTG1 for 13bb then cried he had no other options. Last week he busted jamming QTs utg, and K8s Mp. He is bad top to bottom.

I can't believe anyone gives a **** what this idiotic loser is up to.

Mike is a car crash.

Car crashes draw attention.

The Kanye West effect.

This whole rant starts at 10:32

Antonio asking why they don't respect you. Probably because of this.

It's pretty clear the point he's getting at here, Him and Matusow are both large field donkament specialists in that they make their EV by exploiting the largely drooler population. Taking pure GTO lines against these types of players is not only going to reduce your max value potential but in many cases lead to lighting money on fire. If Hellmuth was a super high roller reg this line of thinking would be wildly incorrect but in context he has a point.

He may well always have been that way. I still remember that big hand back in 2004 vs Greg Raymer. Fossilman raised big before the flop and shoved for 3 times pot on a Td9dX board. Matusow´s thought process was basically whether he was good at this point of the hand and that´s it. He was even proud of himself for making "a great call" (from what I remember, he had 98 lol) after he had lost a 50/50 for most his chips. He basically played it like a bad cash game player.

I really wonder what percentage of those big TV pros ever made a good/decent living just from playing Poker. The percentage must be pretty low, in my opinion.