Love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him
Phil Hellmuth has been a polarizing figure in the poker world for decades. Do you hate his antics at the table or are you entertained by them? Gold glasses a good look: yes or no? In recent years, though, internet debate – and boy can we count on the internet to take sides with little to no in between on any topic whatsoever – has been whether or not Hellmuth is actually a good poker player.
At first blush, that looks ridiculous. The man has over $30 million in live tournament earnings and has lapped the field with 17 World Series of Poker bracelet wins. He is clearly one of the best tournament players of all time.
But what some argue is that his cash game skills are lacking. And one person, in particular, may have pushed some of Hellmuth’s buttons in the last few days. Marc Goone, founder of the poker coaching site Hungry Horse Poker, posted a half-hour video on YouTube last week titled, “I watched 100+ hours of Phil Hellmuth. Is he ACTUALLY good at poker?”
Poker pro analyzes Hellmuth’s game
In the video, Goone says that Hellmuth’s major cash game leak is fear, the same leak that many low-stakes players have. He goes on to show five ways that “playing scared” appears in Hellmuth’s game and uses the video to teach viewers how to spot it in their own game and exploit it in others.
Whether or not Goone’s observations are accurate is up for debate, but they may have touched a nerve with Hellmuth, who over the weekend tweeted out a challenge to all comers to prove that he is a skilled cash game player.
“Talk is cheap,” Hellmuth said. “If someone actually believes that I am a losing player in cash games (I have won over $3M since 2014 in cash games and have tax records to prove it), then will they put their money where their mouth is?”
He continued to lay out the challenge: $500,000 buy-in a piece in “televised cash games,” which one might assume to simply be cash games or No-Limit Hold’em cash games. Hellmuth added that he is up $110,000 in the $25/$50 “Hellmuth’s Home Game.”
So far, it doesn’t look like any one-on-one matches have been confirmed, though you never know if Hellmuth has been in contact with anyone in private before making anything known to the public.
One person did take the opportunity to criticize him for his role as the primary poker pro spokesperson for UltimateBet even after the superuser cheating scandal was exposed in 2007 and up until the site vanished after Black Friday in 2011.
“Maybe you’ve got a lot better since black Friday back when I was playing but I doubt it, you were an absolute fish,” wrote X user “Svened85”. “Back then I’d have jumped at this offer but I lost all my operating capital when the site you were a spokesperson for stole all the player funds including mine.”
Image credit: PokerGO.com
