Phil Hellmuth, man of maturity

The good folks at PokerSavvy gave me a 30-day free trial of their site. I've downloaded maybe 20 videos that I thought looked interesting, and have watched five of them so far. I'll have a lot more to say about them one of these days.

For now, I just wanted to share this screen shot. The video is a session that Shaun Deeb played with Phil Hellmuth, with commentary by Dani Stern.

Three observations:

1. I haven't heard Stern speak before. He strikes me as an extraordinarily sharp poker mind--highly impressive real-time, rapid-fire analysis of each situation and how he would play it, with clear, lucid explanations of the reasons. He runs circles around where I am in being able to make decisions. He's also funny. At one point, he says the play is so bad in this game that "it's like watching blind, retarded monkeys throw shit at each other." When a bad player he knows well from past encounters gets into a raising war with Hellmuth, he says, "Uh-oh. Donkey-on-donkey violence."

2. I obviously have no love lost for Hellmuth, but it's still almost painful to hear how these other pros have zero respect for his play. Sure, it's all no-limit hold'em, but make it a cash game instead of a tournament, move it to the faster pace of online play, change the game to short-handed, and Phil is completely out of his element. In televised cash poker, one frequently hears other well-known pros talk about welcoming Hellmuth to the games because he ends up being a big donator. It's always hard to know how much of that is sincere and how much is a combination of self-promotion and playing mind games with Phil to make him tilt. But in commentary such as Stern is providing here, it's transparently sincere. They are aching to join the game and take his money, openly referring to him as the fish in the game, and discussing how the play should be calculated to take advantage of his constant mistakes. Stern even says at one point that he stopped playing at UB because the site is so shady, but if Hellmuth regularly plays this level of cash game there, he might have to suck it up and start playing there again. To be sure, there are levels of bad, and there's no hold'em game in which Phil is going to be anywhere near as bad as, say, many of the tourists I play against every day in the casinos. But when put up against those who specialize in online, short-handed, deep-stacked cash games, he's chum for the sharks just as much as I would be. Too bad for him that he's constitutionally incapable of ever recognizing that. No fear of tapping on the glass in this case--the fish is deaf.

3. Didn't really mean to go off on that tangent there. I mainly posted this snapshot so that you could see that Phil is every bit as professional and mature and self-controlled when playing online--at the site for which he is the prime representative, no less--as he is in casino-based tournaments. Note the chat box. Nice, Phil. The snaps are just a few seconds apart and together show a single string of Phil's chat, though it omits one additional misspelled "idiot." On the hand in question, they got it all in pre-flop. His opponent had 9-9 and flopped a set. Phil's hand wasn't shown, but it's likely he had a larger pair and took a bad beat.