I would be shocked if it's not Lon and Norman doing a lot of the main event coverage.

The KJ fold is horrendous/
He's made some other awful plays ( the QQ fold a million years ago on pad)
But he clearly is doing a lot right in these tournaments and chances are when he does something weird he's actually right.

Chino Rheem: 8 cashes this WSOP.
Must be the clean living.

that sucks

I think Hellmuth's secret sauce is that he's a bully.

We may not see it at final tables so much, but during most of the tourney he bullies less savvy players pretty relentlessly (so I've heard).

I turned the stream on just in time to catch that gigantic bite of his roast beef sandwich. Forget what I said earlier about not caring less if Hellmuth is on TV, the entire stream was pretty entertaining. Props to Remko and DP for making it happen.

As those who watched will remember, the KJ fold happened shortly before Hellmuth raise/folded AT preflop with a stack of about 18 BBs. Hellmuth min-raised the button, Kuenwai Lo shoved for 16x, Jackson folded, then Hellmuth's cards almost beat Jackson's into the muck.

Lo had KK, so Hellmuth's immediate fold certainly looks like some level of white magic genius. But I'm wondering if the AT preflop and the KJ on the 674J turn are effectively the same play. Hellmuth folds in these types of spots all of the time. When he's "right," he looks brilliant and I'm sure he gets any number of people telling him so. In all other cases, we all scratch our collective heads, but any critic would get a "Buddy, I've been playing this game for 40 years, look how many bracelets I have" response.

[Even right now as I type this, I want to go back to the famous "Honey, I was supposed to go broke in that hand... but I can dodge bullets, baby" declaration to see what that hand was. Could be yet another one of those bad "good folds"]

Count me among those who don't get it, but it sure seems there must be some method to that madness after all these years of results. Early in the boom, we tourney noobs used to hear adages like "a bad call is far worse than a bad fold" and "better to win a small pot than lose a big one." Perhaps there is more wisdom to these than any of us want to let on. Hellmuth himself always brags about letting people try to run all over him because those same people will eventually "give me all of their chips." Moreover, it seems like his telling Jackson that he folded KJ is part of that particular strategy.

I'm not sure if the bolded is quite right, but it certainly happens quite often (1-for-2 in the hands I cited above). Still weird to me, though – like the probabilities of tournament poker should be working against any player being that cautious.

I didn't stay around for any post-tourney interviews... did anyone ask him about either of those two hands?

Queue many people posting it now





What an awful tourney director threat / decision - it's going to blow this up 10x more than if she just did her job properly and moved on

lmao, does she not know what year it is?

The circuit grinder "skillset" of irritating old people until they can't think straight.

If anything I'm disappointed the duplicate 3 doesn't have its own twitter account by now!

https://twitter.com/StarwoodGLP/stat...2Findex28.html

“Coming Soon Horseshoe Las Vegas, where 3 of Spades so nice we deal it twice” lol.

Pretty good story old school Ivey final tabling 3 high rollers and second in one of them. Then Internet player Jungleman winning the $50K mixed game 2 years in a row.

People keep saying he plays every tournament but he clearly plays way less then guys like deeb etc,who also play all those online events and they still can't make up ground winning bracelets

Hellmuth's non holdem bracelets are in razz and NL 2-7 single draw. In razz, it is really important if a player paired a hole card. In single draw, if you miss your draw, you often have close to nothing. Perhaps Hellmuth can pick up live reads and get information from his betting approaches.

In tournaments, you can pick up a lot of chips from donks early on and then take advantage of people playing scared later on, playing effective stake much higher than they are used to.

Hellmuth clearly does not play well at all technically, and that is also true of his play in non-holdem games.

Little do you know you she's perfected her job. Everyone reposting this now and WSOP getting tons of free advertising.

It’s funny, but also kind of a big deal. I have no idea how many times a foul deck is introduced and discovered in play at WSOP throughout the entire series, but I imagine a foul deck in play in the $10K Main wouldn’t make the NGC or NGCB very happy, much less the table players that paid $10K. I can see why she would want to snuff this story out toot-suite.

'Tis now my Twitter background photo.

What’s the story behind the two 3 of spades hand? I don’t see anything about it on Poker News.

Whatever the story here, this is not going to enhance anyone's resume. This is a case where publicity is not good.

Deebs first hebdon cash is 2006
Counting 2006 helmuth has 7 bracelets
Deeb has 5 and I don't think he's been playing huge volume like this for at least half of that time

He also crushes cash and helmuth sucks at cash

No one plays more scared late in tournaments than Hellmuth

This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say people try way too hard to belittle PH's achievements

He has 64 final tables
13 runner-ups
16 wins

So that means of 64 final tables, 29 of them or almost 50% of the time he makes it to heads-up.
Based on pure randomness, if tables are nine-handed, he should have 14, not 29.
So he is literally 100% better than the average rando who makes it to a final table.
Not a little bit better, but literally TWICE as good.
And he has the largest sample size of final tables of any player in history

But "no one plays more scared late in tournaments than Hellmuth"
Are you serious?
Maybe everyone should play as scared as him since it gives you about a 45% chance of winning or getting 2nd place money
You should say, "no one plays BETTER late in tournaments than Hellmuth"

People, you can try all you want to find a flaw in his WSOP results, but you'll look ridiculous trying.

And lemme state, I find him to be a horrific face for the game, but his results are just out of this world
Also, the numbers show that if Ivey hadnt taken an 8 year break from the WSOP, he would likely be equal to or have surpassed PH in bracelets at this point.
He had 10 bracelets and 5 runner ups in his first 14 years of WSOP

There's another guy in America who causes this level of cognitive dissonance too. People say he is an idiot, the dumbest man alive, but he has numerous skyscrapers with his names on them, owns 17 golf courses around the world, had a top 10 TV show for a decade, and won the presidency in his first try, beating two of the most powerful and established American family political dynasties in the process. I'm not a fan of his, but how many lifetimes would it take you to do any one of those things? Own just one golf course? or one skyscraper? Or get one TV show on network TV, or win any tiny elected office in your first try? If that guy is an idiot, what word applies to the rest of us? The 99.9999% who have nothing close to those accomplishments? I dont know how you sit in a meeting and tell him he is stupid and doesnt know what he is doing when he can rattle off those accomplishments. Just like Phil, there has to be something right in their process.

Your kids and family won't love you any less because you're not PH or He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
Pointing out one person's success is not a slam on you

It's a huge sign of immaturity and a lack of intellect to not be able to separate your feelings from the reality of a situation

Too much "I hate them so I must belittle everything about them, even if it makes no sense"

could have been worse

Not to mention a father who was one of the richest real estate developers in the country...asset transfer that got him to the Forbes 400 overnight...a flopped TV show that sank in the ratings that only made the top 20 Nielsen ratings only because has been celebities were used to save the ratings...

I'd rather learn Hellmuth's 1 in a million White Magic than the highly generic GTO.

The only other person I'd rather be a student of than Hellmuth is Jungleman who has Hellmuth's White Magic and Dominic Nitsche's GTO at the highest levels.