Bedtime story

I'm about to hit the sack, and was just re-checking the PokerNews feeds from the last few hours to see what I might have missed. Found one more story to pass on.

PN has hired some exceptionally fine poker writers. (A few pretty weak ones, too, but we need not focus on them.) Here's my nominee for the best post of the day:

Tilt-a-Phil?

We picked up a hand with everybody's favorite whipping boy, Phil
Hellmuth, on the flop. The board showed 10h-As-9c, and the under-the-gun player
led out for 5,200. He was called by Hellmuth before a third player in the hand,
Tony Clark, raised to 16,000. Clark's raise folded the under-the-gun player and
brought the action back to Hellmuth. He called, then checked the 4c turn. Clark
immediately moved all in for about 29,000. That sent Hellmuth into the tank,
where he started talking to his opponent.

"If you have ace-queen, you're dead," said Hellmuth. There was no
response.

"Buddy, what are you doing?" Hellmuth asked. He then asked Clark whether or
not he was overplaying ace-queen.

After several minutes, Hellmuth still hadn't acted. One of the players at
the table called for a clock, and a floor was summoned to the table. Hellmuth
seemed surprised, and asked who called for the clock.

"I did," said Ramzi Jelassi, a player who has engaged in several verbal
sparring matches with Hellmuth today. When Hellmuth asked how long he'd been
thinking, Ramzi told him it was four minutes. Hellmuth seemed to think, based on
that response, that it was fair that a clock had been called.

As the floor counted him down, Hellmuth finally made the call, slamming his
chips into the middle. Clark turned over 10d-10s for a set of tens, far ahead of
Hellmuth's Ad-Kc. The river bricked out 2c, allowing Clark to double up at
Hellmuth's expense.

"You probably won't make it 'til the end of the day," said Hellmuth. He
then got out of his chair and went to talk to his wife on the rail.

That hand seemed to light a fire under Hellmuth. He started playing every
hand. First, after Matt Vengrin raised from late position to 3,000, Hellmuth
raised all in. Vengrin called with Ad-Kd and was a dominating favorite over
Hellmuth's Ac-Qs. The board ran out Qc-Jd-8c-4h-Qh to make trip queens for
Hellmuth and send Vengrin to the rail.

We stepped away from the table for two minutes, only to come back and see
him involved in the very next pot, on the river. Hellmuth bet 20,000 into a
20,000-chip pot with the board showing 5d-10c-Qc-9d-Qh. Ryan Hughes made the
call; Hellmuth very confidently slammed his Qs-9s down on the table and
proclaimed, "Nuts!"

Hellmuth played one more hand immediately thereafter, getting a player to
call a raise to 9,000 on the turn (after that player bet 4,000) and a bet of
10,000 on the river. Hellmuth showed Qh-Qd, an overpair to the board. His
opponent mucked.

After all of that, Hellmuth's stack is at 143,000. He still seems to be
muttering to himself about the Clark hand, but we did hear him say, "None of
that matters now." We'll see if he actually believes it.

This is truly exceptional--live blogging of a poker tournament at its finest. I can't think of any post out of the thousands I've read in the past month that better conveyed a sense of what it's like to be there watching a table for some period of time. It's an actual story, with a beginning, middle, and end, with the pieces all fitting together. It's chock-full of details that bring the bare-bone facts to life. The writing is lively--you can tell how much work went into crafting it, which is especially remarkable given the crushing time constrainsts these guys are working under.

Anybody who has spent any time watching Hellmuth on TV will, I think, attest that this post absolutely nails his personality. Even if no name had been given, you would know it was Hellmuth being described, because of how well the writing captures him.

Aside from the merits of the post, I loved several other things here:

(1) Phil berates a player who, as far as I can tell, played his pocket tens flawlessly, getting maximum value from them. Kind of reminds me of how Freddy Deeb, in the first-ever episode of the World Poker Tour, got eliminated, and ranted to the camera about how terrible his opponent was. He said something like, "I'd like to play poker with that guy every day for the rest of my life!" The opponent? A then-unknown Gus Hansen.

(2) After criticizing a player (erroneously) for overplaying A-Q, what does Hellmuth do next? Overplays A-Q, running it into A-K as a roughly 3:1 underdog, and getting lucky. Imagine his reaction if the roles had been reversed on that one.

(3) Even after bouncing back from the hit, Hellmuth just can't let that one hand go. My guess is that in reality he's mad at himself for being so far off in his read, and embarrassed for having been so wrong in front of the cameras. No wonder people laugh when he makes over-the-top claims about his scary-good ability to look into opponents' souls and know what they're holding. (Don't get me wrong--he's no slouch in that department as pros go, but there's nothing mystical about it, and he's no better than a long list of other top names you could throw out.)

In making my comments and rants here lately about various PokerNews posts, I've almost never named the bloggers, because who wrote them hasn't been very important to the points I wanted to make. I'll make an exception here, though, and give credit where it is due: If you peruse the best-written poker blogs out there, Riding the F-Train is on nearly every one of their blogrolls. If you didn't before, now you know why.