OK I'll admit, I threw Hellmuth in the subject line to light some emotional fires and get people to read / respond.

Yes, Hellmuth has the most bracelets and cashes.

BUT, Hellmuth plays like every event possible.

Meanwhile, Chan doesn't play as much but has as many bracelets and plenty of cashes. This is one example of many I could use to set up my final question.

Is there a way to get stats on the number of tourney's a player has played in? Can we somehow determine stats for the top pro's in terms of % times cashed per tourney played? There are other stats we can determine using a knowledge of tourney's entered.

It's like Hellmuth taking 660 at bats in a season and hitting 60 home runs...meanwhile A-Rod is injured and can only take 400 at bats but hits 60 HR's.

Thoughts? Questions? Insults?

The problem is that the data on buyins simply isn't available, or this would have been done long ago.

You'd think there's some paparazzi out there, at least from the past few years (and certainly not from the '90's), who could prove number of entries for Hellmuth or ofther paparazzi's that follow other pro's.

Oh well, if we can't find number of buy-ins, it's hard to really contest Hellmuth vs. Chan. Chan claims he doesn't play as many tourney's per year as Hellmuth, but we'll never really know. Although from qualitative inspection, I really like Chan

Again, thoughts or insults are welcome.

Stu Ungar imo

Jamie Gold, obv...

Serious answer - I think that as soon as Hellmuth wins a non NLHE tourney - possibly even the big HORSE tourney - the arguments against him being "best ever" (whatever that means) will start to be personal, not factual.

Until then, he's the best ever NLHE WSOP player. (so far)

As for the best ever all-around? You have to consider Scotty - winner of the ME and the big HORSE tourney - that's pretty impressive. (drunken douchebag interview notwithstanding)

Doyle should be considered, but the small fields when he won most of his bracelets takes a bit 'away' from consideration.

It's a tough question in general - everybody's definition of greatest ever is different.

OT

Given the data available, $ won is the most meaningful statistic. Otherwise two $1500 events with 40 entrants each are more important than a $10k event with 8000 entrants.

there you have it, folks - jamie gold, best wsop player ever by a longshot

I have read entire thread yet and am disapointed to see NO statistics

Allen Cunnigham. Because to quote Norman Chad, "it's Allen Cunningham!"

Obviously there's so much variance any version of "best" means the "best results", not the objectively "best player". Unless your results have say a 95% confidence of being the best, you can't really say much about it.

Some sort of formula calculating the number of events, number of entrants, amount of buyin probably gets close. Although I'm not sure if there'd be much in the way of temporal variables - how much more difficult would events in the 1980s be, adjusting for all the other variables?

what about iveeey?

Okay, I put together some stats! Unfortunately I did this before noticing that you asked about WSOP player and I just did overall tourney results.

I subtracted each player's biggest win from their overall gross as they are statistical outliers (and thus players who have gotten the majority of their money from one win fall significantly out of the running).

Subtracting their biggest single win, the top ten tournament cashers are:

1) Phil Hellmuth $9,536,243
2) Daniel Nagreanu $8,678,344
3) T.J. Cloutier $8,476,635
4) Phil Ivey $8,386,608
5) Men Nguyen $8,349,583
6) Erik Seidel $8,248,841
7) Scotty Nguyen $7,716,741
8) Allen Cuningham $6,588,264
9) David Pham $6,516,176
10) John Juanda $6,409,520

Interesting.....

yeah, but how much have they LOST?

I doubt Hellmuth has spent that much (900K) more in BIs than Negreanu. He might have spent that much more than Ivey because Ivey does not play many smaller tournaments. I'd be pretty sure Hellmuth hasn't spent a mil on BIs than Cloutier because Cloutier has played in so many tournaments over so many years. I'd also think Men Ngueyn and Seidel have played in as many, or more, tournaments than Hellmuth has.

Seems to be a common misconception but Hellmuth doesn't really play every event possible, or even an inordinate number of events.