I thought I couldn't dislike Phil Hellmuth more than I already did. Turns out I was wrong about that. In fact, I'm thinking now that my capacity for disliking him may actually be infinite. Still, I didn't know, until last night, that I would end up including "poor math skills" on my list of reasons for disliking him.
On this week's installment of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" an interesting situation came up. The hand itself was pretty unremarkable, as you can see from the cards shown in the accompanying screenshot. What was interesting was whiny Phil Hellmuth's negotiations for "insurance" on the hand.
In this game, $67,000 pots are bigger than average, but not all that unusual. In most episodes there are one or two pots that climb into the $100,000-$200,000 territory. So to start off with, it's strange for a player to be so afraid of losing that he'd seek insurance on a pot of this size. Nobody else at the table would even think of it--only Phil, who, for some reason, just can't stand losing a biggish pot. This is particularly strange, since he is up by a couple hundred grand for this session, as he has already bragged.
But OK, it's his right in this game to try to reduce the chance that Eli Elezra will catch a lucky card and steal this pot from him. They could agree to run the last card twice, for example, and it would be highly unlikely that Eli would luck out twice in a row, so Phil would be almost guaranteed at least half of the pot. Another possibility is one that Eli explicitly offered: give Eli a quarter of the pot and take three-quarters for himself. I've seen Phil make this kind of arrangement when he's in a dominant position and all-in against Barry Greenstein in a previous season; if I recall correctly, Phil was something like a 90% favorite, and Greenstein agreed to give him 80% of the pot, and they didn't even play out the rest of the cards. In Greenstein's more rational view, he'll take the expected value that Phil is giving up, and not worry about the variance.
For some reason, though, Phil this time wants to go the "insurance" route. That is, he wants to pay somebody a small amount if he wins the hand and, in exchange, be paid a larger amount in the event that Eli draws out on him. This is where it starts to get strange.
I have the episode on my hard drive, so I can play it back and do a verbatim transcript. Phil says, "Queen is a chop. All right, I'm just going to insure against a nine or a jack."
Here's Phil's first mistake. It's true that a queen on the river chops the pot, because both players would have two pairs, kings and queens with a 10 kicker. But Phil fails to notice that a 10 also produces a split pot, because it gives both players tens and kings with a queen kicker.
Phil continues: "So it's eight outs.... 36 to eight is the actual odds. I'm a 4 1/2 to 1 favorite."
That's his second and third mistakes. Eli actually has only seven outs to win the pot outright: the four remaining jacks to make a straight, and the three remaining 9s to make a better two pairs. Additionally, Phil is strangely counting the cards that make for a chopped pot as being on his side. (Sam Farha folded a 9 and a 10, which would affect the calculation if Phil knew about them, but he doesn't, so we'll consider them as unknowns, treating them the same as the ones still in the dealer's hand.)
The actual odds, not counting the queens and 10s, are 31 cards for Phil and seven cards for Eli, which is 4.4:1 (which, by coincidence, happens to be close to what Phil said, though he was wrong in how he got there). If you account for the pot-splitting cards by adding them to both players' sides of that ratio, it's 37:13, or only 2.8:1.
Phil asks for insurance at 4:1. "I'm 4 1/2 to 1. I'll take 4 to 1. I'm letting you have above 10%. You're getting 12 1/2% juice. That's pretty good."
Brandon Adams takes him up on it for $40,000 to $10,000. That is, Hellmuth is to pay Adams $10,000 if he wins the hand, and collect $40,000 from Adams if Elezra sucks out on him. Then Farha joins the deal for an additional $8000 to $2000.
The dealer puts out the river card: a queen, and the pot is split.
Now Hellmuth says, "It's a split pot, nobody has to pay any insurance."
Farha objects, but then both Jamie Gold and Daniel Negreanu remind him that Phil specified that he was only insuring against a jack or a 9, and Farha, for some reason, accepts that.
But that's what is most strange here. You would expect Adams and Farha to collect their insurance payment, because the event against which they were providing insurance did not occur. Phil said he wanted insurance against a jack or a 9, and none came--so he owes his "premium" to his insurers. What's more, he was unambiguously including the pot-chopping cards as being for him in his proposal, when he claimed that he was a 36:8 favorite. He never said that a chopped pot would mean no money going either way as part of his offer.
So one of two things happened: The insurance deal was made with the understanding that a split pot meant Phil owed insurance, and he reneged on his end of it, or he misrepresented the terms of the offer. By coincidence, he happened to state the odds approximately correctly for the situation in which a chopped pot meant no payment either way, but his explanation clearly included the implication that he would pay up in the case of a chopped pot. It's a very strange situation, and I wonder whether debate among the participants continued after the taping stopped, and whether any money ended up changing hands. (This was the last hand of the night.)
However they worked it out amongst themselves, we're left with these conclusions: Phil Hellmuth doesn't know how to count an opponent's outs. He's a high-stakes dweeb who, uniquely among these players, can't tolerate the swings that inevitably come with playing for these amounts. Finally, he either misrepresented the offer he was presenting to Adams and Farha or welched on it after the hand was over.
If you didn't have enough reasons to dislike Hellmuth before, there's at least three more for you.
Addendum, October 30, 2007:
I've been discussing the math of this with a bunch of other people at the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ forums, and one of them just posted a link to this entry from Hellmuth's blog, apparently made soon after the taping of the show in question: http://www.philhellmuth.com/phil-hellmuth-poker-blog.html?id=1866 In this post, he says, "Later on, I figured out that I owed $12,000 to Brandon ($10,000) and Sammy ($2,000), because they insured the very last hand of the night. By the way, Brandon doesn't even know that I owe him $10,000, because I decided that I owe him after the fact! He will be pleasantly surprised, that's for sure."
Glad to know that he finally did the right thing. Still hard to know why they didn't get it sorted out on the spot.
Addendum, November 4, 2007
Brandon Adams just posted a note about this situation to the twoplustwo forums:
Yo, I should have commented on the Hellmuth insurance thing earlier. First off,
Phil is one of my favorite guys in poker. He's not cheating anyone. I'm going
off memory here....The deal was only partially clear in my head at the time of
the insurance. it was obviously a good deal for me. when we chopped, i didn't
know what we were supposed to do, though since insurance naturally is protection
against something bad happening (in this case, a bad beat) and something bad
didn't happen, my first thought was that a chop went to me. but then i started
thinking about it and i realized that the deal was good for me even if a chop
was a chop. so i was confused and decided to let it go. this is just what i
remember thinking... as of now, i have no recollection of the cards and i
haven't read the above. The next day phil runs into mori at the coffee shop and
tells mori that he should have paid me. Phil emailed me to tell me he owed me
10k. I thought about it some more and told him not to pay me. I said this b/c if
i had won with a chop, then that implied some ridiculous vig for me (i still had
a decent edge counting a chop as a chop). He insisted on paying me, I told him
we'd flip a coin for it, then he said he'd pay me $6k. he paid me $6k the first
time i saw him at the series. ba
This is pretty reasonable of Adams. Here's the math on what he's saying: Suppose the deal had been explicitly made that no insurance money went either way in the event of a chopped pot. There are 31 cards that win the whole pot for Phil, 7 for Eli, so the odds against an insurer having to pay out are 31:7, or 4.4:1. That's what Adams is calling the "decent edge counting a chop as a chop." On the other hand, if a chopped pot meant that Phil still had to pay his insurance "premium," then there are 37 cards on which he has to pay it (the 31 that are an outright win, plus the 6 cards that result in a split pot), and only 7 on which he collects insurance. 37:7 is 5.3:1, which is what Adams is here calling "some ridiculous vig for me" (32%, actually, compared to the 11% he decided was "decent").
In any event, it sounds like they ended up settling it like gentlemen.
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