Best televised hands

PokerUpdate has been running a "tournament" to determine readers' most memorable televised poker hand, out of 32 nominees. I haven't been following closely as things progress, but I popped in to see what the final four were--and they are all excellent, well worth re-watching.

http://www.pokerupdate.com/news/poker-opinion/the-most-memorable-televised-poker-hand/

For sheer poker skill, the one with Tom Dwan is the clear winner. But for viewing pleasure, it's hard to top seeing Phil Hellmuth take the bad end of one of the most incredible suckouts of all time.

Hellmuth vs. Negreanu

I never get tired of seeing Phil Hellmuth lose.

Separated at birth?

I saw a picture of Senator Ted Cruz somewhere, and at first glance I thought it was Phil Hellmuth. I looked more carefully, and came to think that they are twins separated at birth. What do you think?

(Photo of Hellmuth found here, credited to Getty Images. Photo of Ted Cruz found here, with no photo credit.)

Pity Phil Hellmuth

It's not easy to be assigned to write a feature about a well-known player for a poker publication. They've all been interviewed and profiled to death. Coming up with something new and interesting to say about them takes hard work and creativity. Getting the tone of such pieces right--neither sycophantic hero-worship nor gratuitous bashing--complicates the task.

My friend Dave Behr (of "Riding the F Train" blog) has, in my opinion, been absolutely nailing this difficult genre recently with a series of player profiles in Bluff magazine. These have included features on John Racener in May and Eugene Katchalov in July. But the one that has been sitting on my desk, with my thoughts about it percolating since I read it a couple of months ago, is the one about Phil Hellmuth in the September issue (not yet available online).

The article focuses, naturally, on his series of second-place finishes in this year's World Series of Poker. He was not only runner-up in three major bracelet events, but in the Player of the Year race, too, though at the time of this interview he still had a chance to take that title away from Ben Lamb if he did well enough at the WSOP-Europe.

I don't think this was the intent of either the interviewer or interviewee, but I was most struck by how pitiful a character Hellmuth is. Specifically, I find it terribly sad--and, frankly, baffling--that he has accomplished so much, yet is still so overtly desperate to win the world's approval.

Consider these excerpts from Dave's feature:

"I felt like 99 percent of the planet was rooting for me [to win the $50,000 Poker Player's Championship]," Hellmuth said a few weeks after the 2011 WSOP ended. "Even if you hated me, seeing me finish second twice and knowing the pain and the turmoil that it was causing me had to be enough to say, 'I hope you get this one.' Of course, maybe it was out of pity." ...

Hellmuth reiterated that all he really cares about is winning bracelets. He feels like he could win 24 before he stops playing poker, a benchmark by which his career might be measured. "Nobody is going to judge me by Player of the Year," he said....

But there are still critics out there who say that the 2011 WSOP proved once again that Hellmuth can't beat the great players, can't win the big buy-in tournaments, and can't win in non-Hold'em games. For all of his success this year and over the course of his career, Hellmuth is bothered by those people. He said he listens to his "haters" too much.

"Phil Jackson, what does he say during his parting interview?" Hellmuth asked. "The greatest coach of all time says, 'You won't have me to kick around anymore.' Nine percent of the world can't related to that.* Like, what's he talking about? This is the greatest coach of all time. But he listens to his critics. I listen to my critics."

Published at nearly the same time was another interview with Hellmuth for Poker Player newspaper (the September 26, 2011, issue, page 10) by Lou Krieger and Shari Geller. This one is nowhere near as original or insightful as Dave's. It reads like a generic bit of promotion for the iPhone poker app that Hellmuth recently put his name on--which is probably exactly what it was. Still, there was another quotation included that continues the same theme:

"Like it or not, I play for my fans and friends, but I hear all the critics. There have been a lot of critics saying 'Phil can't do this, he can't do that, he can't play in the modern era.' Well everything they said I couldn't do, I did this year."

You see the common theme, don't you? He is terribly obsessed with what everybody in the world of poker thinks about him. It doesn't matter how much money he has won. It doesn't matter how long his list of successes is. It doesn't matter how many people like and/or admire him. He can't get over the fact that there remain others who are not sufficiently convinced that he's a great player, and he is doggedly trying to win the approval of every last one of them.

Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying that he'll stay on the radio until everybody agrees with him. It's a fool's errand, of course, a Sisyphean task that can never be accomplished, as there is absolutely nothing on which all people everywhere will agree. Limbaugh obviously knows this; his tongue in firmly in cheek. But I'm not sure Hellmuth grasps it. My impression of him is that he will go to his grave bothered by the fact that there remain some people who refuse to acknowledge his poker talent.

I am reminded of my favorite Aesop's fable (though I just learned from Wikipedia, to my chagrin, that the common attribution is false, and it is not a genuine Aesop), "The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey." Here is one common recitation of the tale:

A man and his son were once going with their donkey to market. As they were walking along by his side a countryman passed them and said, "You fools, what is a donkey for but to ride upon?" So the man put the boy on the donkey, and they went on their way.

But soon they passed a group of men, one of whom said, "See that lazy youngster, he lets his father walk while he rides."

So the man ordered his boy to get off, and got on himself. But they hadn't gone far when they passed two women, one of whom said to the other, "Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along."

Well, the man didn't know what to do, but at last he took his boy up before him on the donkey. By this time they had come to the town, and the passersby began to jeer and point at them. The man stopped and asked what they were scoffing at.

The men said, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey of yours -- you and your hulking son?"

The man and boy got off and tried to think what to do. They thought and they thought, until at last they cut down a pole, tied the donkey's feet to it, and raised the pole and the donkey to their shoulders. They went along amid the laughter of all who met them until they came to a bridge, when the donkey, getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle the donkey fell over the bridge, and his forefeet being tied together, he was drowned.

Try to please everyone, and you will please no one.

Source: Joseph Jacobs, The Fables of Æsop (London: Macmillan and Company, 1902), no. 63, pp. 149-51.

You can't go through life trying to win the admiration and approval of everybody you encounter. It can't be done, and you'll make yourself crazy trying.

I can't figure out why Hellmuth cares that there are people who won't give him the credit and respect he feels he deserves. A mentally healthy person would take his own measure and decide whether it is or isn't good enough, perhaps taking into account the assessments of family, close friends, and trusted advisers, but not waste time or emotional energy with what millions of strangers think.

For reasons that I can't wrap my head around, Phil Hellmuth seems unable to do that. Instead, he continually worries that there remain poker players who don't respect him, and wonders what he has to do to win them over. For that, he is, in my view, a man to be pitied.

(Image above is Hellmuth in a Speedo many years ago. He sent this out via Twitter a while back. I was torn between using it and the one of him piloting a giant hot dog boat. Did I choose wisely?)

*That "nine percent" struck me as peculiar. "Ninety percent" would seem more natural, even though, obviously, neither one would be meant to be taken with scientific precision. I emailed Dave to ask about it, and he told me that it was indeed "ninety," but was somehow changed to "nine" by an editing error at the magazine.

Who not to trust in political prognostication

Barry Greenstein, October, 2007:

I'm sure it will be less than 6 months before Congress realizes that they
need to pass legislation contrary to the UIEGA. If it hasn't already happened,
it will happen in a few weeks.

Yeah, right.

I was reminded of this by reading today's post from Shamus, in which he quotes Phil Hellmuth in a recent Card Player magazine interview:

Online poker is going to be licensed and regulated very soon. There are things happening right now that the rest of the poker world doesn’t realize. I think it’s going to happen at the federal level, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by December.

My guess is that he'll end up looking just as deluded as Greenstein did.

Or maybe I will. One never knows. But in the matter of online poker licensing, as with predictions of the Rapture, skeptics have a far better track record than believers.

Interesting TV hand

This happened Thursday on the PokerStars "Big Game." It was indisputably the hand of the week. Watch it here (cuz if you don't, the rest of what I have to say won't make any sense):





(In case that embed stops working for some reason, go here, find Week 10, Episode 4, and fast forward to the 13:30 mark.)

I thought there were all sorts of interesting things about this hand.

Hellmuth's call

I was stunned when he made the call. Yeah, I know it's easy to make good decisions when I'm looking at the guy's hole cards. But that's not it. It's a confluence of two thoughts. First, this "loose cannon" had not put all his chips into the pot all week, and he was not under any extraordinary time pressure to do so here.

Second, of the hands with which the LC might shove there, what could Hellmuth beat? As Hellmuth himself notes, he's unlikely to have pushed with A-10, let alone A-2. A wary call would be the play of choice. So if his opponent is value-betting because he thinks he's ahead, he has top two pair (A-J), a set, or a straight--all of which have Hellmuth beat.

I conclude from that that Hellmuth saw this guy's range as purely polarized: he was very strong or he was on a complete bluff with, most likely, a busted flush draw. Hellmuth must have known that his aces-up hand was only a bluff catcher now, which means that he decided it was more likely than not that the LC (David Fishman) was on a bluff. But that was a very expensive call to make when there were so many plausible hands Fishman could have that had him beat, and when Fishman had shown not a single bluff all week. Hellmuth had to call about $74,000 to win a $167,000 pot, which means that Fishman had to be bluffing at least 44% of the time there to make it a profitable call. That seems to me like a rather large overestimate. Hellmuth had shown strength at every opportunity in the hand; how could he conclude that the amateur would pick this spot for his first big bluff with that kind of frequency, when failure would mean the end of his dream?

Seems like a seriously bad call to me.

The tells

The call gets even worse when factoring in the tells. Hellmuth says after the fact that he hesitated in making the call because of the guy's chatter, the implication being that all the talking made Hellmuth estimate him to be stronger (i.e., less likely to be bluffing) than he otherwise would have. Which, if correct, should have tipped a close decision toward a fold.

But the tells were kind of a mixed bag. First there was the phony "I'm not going to let you do this to me" stuff--sighing, looking scared, rubbing his face as if in fear. Weak means strong. Again, should have been a red flag.

Then there was the obvious trembling. At face value, shaking more often signifies a monster than a bluff, which Phil obviously must know. Assuming he noticed it (and how could he not have? It doesn't show up terribly well in this clip, but it could not have been missed at the time, given how prominent it was), that would be another reason not to call.

I thought the shaking looked unnatural, and in an interview afterwards, Fishman told Amanda Leatherman with a laugh that it was not real. I don't get that. Unless he doesn't even know the most basic facts about tells, why would he simulate looking strong when he was trying to induce a call?

I guess I shouldn't criticize, because whatever he did, it worked--but as I was watching it, I really thought he was harming rather than enhancing his chances for a call. If Hellmuth's commentary after the fact is to be believed, I was correct to be thinking that. He came close to blowing it.

Lesson: Unless you're really, really good at understanding what specific effect your chatter will have on an opponent, it's better to just keep quiet.

For what it's worth, the adrenaline-induced shaking that often sets in with a big hand tends to affect the small muscles more than large ones, so you will see it more in the hands than in the arms or torso. It also tends to be of a higher frequency than what Fishman was doing voluntarily. Those were the two reasons it read false to me; even though trembling would not be unexpected in his situation, it wouldn't look like that.

The aftermath

The clip above cuts off the discussion, but I liked William Perkins (whom I had never heard of before) laying into Hellmuth for his complaining. He said, emphatically and repeatedly, "He's a schoolteacher [read: he doesn't make much]. You have endless trunks of money." In other words, let it go. Rise above it. The money means more to him than it does to you. Grow up, stop whining.

Nicely done, sir, though I'm afraid your target is not capable of learning to behave in the civilized and sportsmanlike way you point out that he should.

The subsequent play

That hand gave Fishman a lock on a big win and a virtual lock on the extra $50,000 end-of-season tournament buy-in bonus--as long as he didn't blow it. He chose to fold every hand thereafter. It cost him about $10,000 in blinds and antes, but he didn't have the option to quit playing, so that was his least costly tactic.

Of course, he could have kept really playing, trying to increase his profits. But, first, that would obviously jeopardize his winnings. And, second, perhaps he understood what would happen. His opponents were no dummies. They would all know that he was now going to be playing scared money, and they would bet and raise him mercilessly, putting him to painful decisions on every street of every hand, knowing that if he played back at them at all, it would only be with the stone-cold nuts and then they could easily fold. Indeed, the one time he momentarily broke from his lock-down commitment, with pocket kings, he tried to limp in, somebody raised, and he agonized before folding. Every single hand would have been like that. It would have been an impossible position from which to try to win. (And, interestingly, the one time he folded pocket aces pre-flop, Phil Laak had 6-6 and flopped the other two sixes in the deck. That could have been a true disaster.)

The lesson: This illustrates that you must be willing to lose in order to win. If your opponents know that you are unwilling to lose any significant fraction of the stakes you have on the table in a no-limit game, you are toast. They will eat you alive, if they're any good. Never continue to play when you have in front of you an amount that you are unwilling to lose, that you are unwilling to put into the pot when you believe you have the best of it.

The commentary

I thought the producers would hate Fishman for basically refusing to play for the last 1 1/2 episodes of a 5-episode series. And maybe they did. But I was glad that they let the two commentators both discuss and praise the LC's strategy. They made clear why he was doing what he was doing. Moreover, they said they didn't blame him at all. They said, paraphrasing, "He's playing by the rules we set up for him. It's his money and he can do with it what he wants to. He has two small children to think about." Maybe it was all phony, meant to cover up the producers' true feelings, and play to what was inevitably going to be an audience rooting for the underdog to have such phenomenal success. Or maybe they really meant it, whether or not the producers agreed with them. Or maybe the producers loved having a nobody walk in and take $130,000 from the pros, and didn't mind him nitting it up the last portion of the week as part of the bargain. I can't tell, and I don't really care. The commentary came off as sensible, supportive, and compassionate, and I appreciated that. It would have felt terribly out of place for them to criticize him in that situation.

The closest they came was when he had the aces and they said something like, "No true poker player can lay that down." But that wasn't true. There are a few rare, specific situations in which folding aces pre-flop is either unquestionably correct or at least justifiable. This was one of them, and his decision to muck A-A said nothing about either his skill or his sincerity as a poker player.

The other players were classy and supportive, too, except for Jason Mercier, who seemed not to understand why the guy was folding every hand, and even placed a prop bet that Fishman had not actually folded aces. (You lose, dude.)

All in all, it made for a really interesting hand, and an interesting aftermath, seeing if he would stick to his chosen strategy, and how the others would react to it. The Big Game doesn't always hit home runs, but last week they sure did.

Poker gems, #401

Joe Stapleton, in PokerStars Big Game, in the middle of Phil Hellmuth bitching at the dealer for giving his amateur opponent the card to fill his gutshot straight, beating Hellmuth's two pair:


Don't blame the dealer. We all know it's the seat that's unlucky.

Poker gems, #392

Phil Hellmuth, on the PokerStars Big Game, October 6, 2010.


I mean, I've added stats and math to my game completely, because, y'know, one of the things I love is the way that the mathematics, the new mathematics in poker, defines the moves that I've made for decades. And I do completely incorporate mathematics and statistics in my game, because why wouldn't you learn that stuff? It takes a couple of hours to really understand the math in poker. Why wouldn't I learn it? I think it's more difficult for them, the mathematical players, to learn what I do, because that's a God-given talent.


[Pardon me while I barf. I bet that Chris Ferguson, Bill Chen, and Jerrod Ankenman are jealous that Phil was able to master the mathematics of poker in just a couple of hours.]

Strange language

I was just reading Todd Brunson's column in the July 28 Card Player magazine. It included this brief story about a mixed-game tournament he was playing, with Phil Hellmuth at the table:

A few hands later, the game was razz, and Phil again tried to dump me some
chips. I raised from the one hole with like six small cards behind me, and Phil
reraised me with a 7 up. Nice hand there, Phil--lol, I mean, did he really think
I had raised into six babies with an 8 in the hole?

I had a 3 up with A-2 in the hole. The one redeeming factor for Phil was
that he might have had a 5 in the hole, as there were three out. But that proved
not to be the case, as Phil bricked on fourth street (as did three others,
including me), then hit the miracle 5 on fifth street.

The only thing remarkable about this account, for me, was the sudden realization that it would have been complete jibberish to me, say, three years ago, before I had played my first hand of razz. Even with a pretty solid understanding of hold'em, I would have had no comprehension of what this story was relating, or the underlying strategic concepts.

I have a few readers who know little or nothing about poker. They read the blog because they know me personally and want to keep up with what I'm doing and thinking. Once in a while I pause and realize how nonsensical it must sound when I write a paragraph or a story that is chock-full of poker terminology and shorthand allusions to strategic concepts that I tend to assume my readers understand without having it all laid out in detail.

The thing that most commonly reminds me of this is when Memphis Mojo does a post about bridge rather than poker, and I'm left scratching my head, trying to grasp what the hell he is talking about--since I don't even know how the game goes. Take this bit from earlier today, for example:

West led the ♦8, a singleton! This has to be an awful lead. Does he
really hope his partner will win the ace and give him a ruff? Haha.

Kate won and led a low diamond to ruff. West was now void, but couldn't
beat my ♠9. Of course, I wouldn't have opened without that card, ahem. She
now had 13 tricks: She took six spades, two hearts, two diamonds, two clubs and
one ruff.

This all means precisely nothing to me. It might as well be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It makes me feel a bit stupid, though logically it shouldn't; I'm simply not informed about the relevant subject matter. (In my defense, I recently had occasion, on a completely unrelated writing project, to toss off a paragraph considering porphyria cutanea tarda, mononeuritis multiplex, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and venous stasis dermatitis, and I'm guessing that Memphis Mojo would be the one left scratching his head over that. So there! Ha!)

All of which is just to say this: Thanks to the non-pokery people who put up with what must be a nearly continual sense of bewilderment at the poker jargon found here. I actually do have some sympathetic sense of how foreign it must feel.

Bracelet race

Shamus just put up an interesting blog post about the bracelet race between Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey. For me this neatly coincided with having yesterday read an article by Storms Reback in the July issue of All In magazine that gave his rating of the ten greatest WSOP players of all time. In order, he listed Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, Ivey, Barry Johnston, Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, and T.J. Cloutier.

As Reback recognizes, overall WSOP performance is about more than bracelets; it also involves cashing and making final tables, and doing so consistently over many years. Although I rather despise Men Nguyen, while preparing the stats below I was impressed to see that he has finished 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in WSOP events an amazing 20 times, in addition to his seven wins. I think he might have a stronger argument for a spot on Reback's list than a couple of the other nominees.

Anyway, I was curious how the bracelet race would look when graphed over the years, since those with the most have been at it for very different periods of time. So I whipped up the following graph of bracelets by years to see how their trajectories looked. I included seven of the eight top bracelet winners (Hellmuth, Brunson, Chan, Ivey, Seidel, Men Nguyen, and Billy Baxter), excluding only Moss. His trajectory is, well, dead; he is unlikely to earn any more bracelets unless the WSOP adopts Chicago-style voting to determine winners.





Brunson's line doesn't really disappear; it's just hiding behind that of Chan, as they coincide for the past several years.

What do we learn from this? Not a lot that wasn't already obvious, I suppose. Baxter has been the longest without notching up; he started off earlier than any of the others and kept a pretty steady pace for a long time, but has perhaps come as far as he is going to go by this metric. (I hope not. I'd love to see him show up the young whippersnappers another time or two before he's done, and yell at them to get off of his lawn during his acceptance speech.)

Brunson started off like gangbusters, racking up six in four years, then has a long stretch of none (I think he played very few events during those years), and just a slow trickle since then.

With one exception, the other lines are rather similar, though with varying degrees of lurching in their progressions. Hellmuth's appears to me to be the most saltatory, Seidel's the most consistently stepwise, with the others somewhere in between.

The striking exception, obviously, is Ivey. He shows up for the first time in 2000, a full eight years behind the most Johnny-Chan-come-lately of the others (Seidel and Nguyen), and rockets up, with the slope of his line, from start to finish, being far steeper than any of the others.

Just for fun, and fully recognizing that it's an utterly meaningless exercise, I wondered how the lines would project into the future, if we assumed that the players would continue racking up bracelets at the same pace as they have since earning their first. Here are their respective numbers for bracelets per year:

Hellmuth: 0.52
Brunson: 0.32
Chan: 0.40
Ivey: 0.80
Seidel: 0.44
Nguyen: 0.39
Baxter: 0.20

You'll notice that one of those figures is far higher than the others, confirming what you would expect from the graph and from just the general knowledge of the relatively short time span in which Ivey has left his mark.

If we project those rates ten years into the future (a completely preposterous assumption for any number of reasons, but bear with me), we would find these rounded totals at the end of WSOP 2020:

Hellmuth: 16
Brunson: 13
Chan: 14
Ivey: 16
Seidel: 12
Nguyen: 11
Baxter: 9

And these for the year 2030:

Hellmuth: 21
Brunson: 16
Chan: 18
Ivey: 24
Seidel: 16
Nguyen: 15
Baxter: 11

So that's my back-of-the-envelope prediction: Ivey catches Hellmuth in 2020, then leaves him in the dust. (Some of the others are, actuarily speaking, also likely to be in the dust by then, in a different sense, but let's not dwell on that.)

You heard it here first.

Dwan vs. Hellmuth

Well worth watching, IMO.

Next best

I'm watching a "Poker After Dark" cash game from June that I had not previously seen. Phil Laak starts with 8h-9h, flops trips, turns a full house. Phil Hellmuth calls Laak's ever-larger bets on every street, including $22,200 on the river, losing something like $37,000 on the hand--with ace high.

After stewing for a few minutes, Hellmuth finally mutters, "I should have played back, actually."

At this, Gus Hansen pipes up: "Well, at least you found the second-best option."

The entrance

This update on PokerWorks suggests that, in a departure from recent years, Phil Hellmuth's grand entrance into the WSOP Main Event will be as a UFC fighter.

I'm dubious. The recent pattern has been that his getup is suggested months in advance by the print ads that UltimateBlecch runs for their WSOP satellites. There was the "UB Army" theme, followed by Phil dressed up as a WWII general. Then there were the "Ultimate Conquest" ads followed by Phil as Caesar.

This year's UB ads have had a strangely Christian/religious theme, and my assumption has been that this means Phil will be dressed as a monk--or, if they really want to offend people, Jesus or the Pope. A UFC fighter would not fit the bill.

Then again, what do I know? I'm just guessing here.

Magically delicious

Words cannot describe how much I love this sneak peek of the new poker show, "The Big Game":




Found at Pokerati, here.

Here's the ugly math. Hellmuth is 86% to win on the flop if they run it once.

Using that as my p value, and the binomial probability calculator here, if they run it twice, Hellmuth has a 74% probability of winning it both times, a 24% probability of winning it once, and a 2% probability of losing both times.

If they run it three times, Hellmuth has a 64% probability of winning all three, a 31% probability of winning exactly two of them, a 5% probability of winning exactly one of them, and less than a <1% probability of losing them all.

If they run it four times, Hellmuth has a 55% probability of winning all four, a 36% probability of winning exactly three of them, a 9% probability of winning exactly two of them, a 1% probability of winning exactly one of them, and a less than 1% probability of losing all four.

In other words, for Hellmuth to end up as badly as you see happen here was a 99:1 shot when the money went in on the flop--a bad beat indeed, and there's nobody I'd rather see it happen to.


Update

Dang. Seems that they changed its status to private on YouTube, so the embed code doesn't work either here or at Pokerati now. Sorry.


Further update, June 11, 2010

A new link, suggested in the comments, now works and I have embedded it in place of the original one.

Not so fast!

Another fine moment from the NBC heads-up poker show today.

You all know by now that there is nobody on the planet who triggers my schadenfreude the way Phil Hellmuth does. I love watching him lose. (I can't wait for the broadcast of the recently concluded WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star event, in which he made the final table, but then was the first one out when his QQ got cracked by AJ with an ace on the river, and he collapsed into a fetal position on the floor.)

In the first hand against Annette Obrestad, Hellmuth flops top two pair with K-4. Obrestad has just bottom pair with 3-2. Hellmuth bets and taunts her: "I'll take the first one." She replies, "We'll see," as she calls.

She then made trips on the turn, and bet out, getting calls on both the turn and river:




The hands are revealed. One of the players is happy. One is unhappy. Can you tell which is which?






But the best part was Obrestad's zinger, just to stick the knife in a little deeper: "I think I'll take the first one, Phil."

Best laugh I had all day.

(And, BTW, hi to Katkin and F-Train hiding there behind Phil!)

Class, or lack thereof

I'm watching the second week of NBC's heads-up poker championship. I was impressed with Orel Hershiser's grace in his exit interview after losing to Annette Obrestad: "I knew I was behind the whole way as far as intelligence and ability in the whole match, so I was always gonna look for a place where maybe I was 55/45 dog but I could get a shot at least at making her fold. She didn't fold. She had the better hand and she's the better player."

I love how Obrestad beams in reaction to those kind words:




She returns the graciousness (after being forced to admit, a bit sheepishly, that she has never seen a baseball game and hadn't known who Hershiser was coming into the event): "I thought he played extremely well and I felt like I was getting run over for most of the match, I wasn't getting any hands, and then, y'know, things kept going my way at the end, and I think I was just lucky to win."

Let's compare that little festival of politeness with how Phil Hellmuth went out after a prolonged heads-up battle with Jens Voertmann on last week's "Poker After Dark." He does the obligatory, "Good game, man," with a handshake, but then says, "Four fucking races in a row," before Leeann Tweeden gets over to him for the formal interview:

"He gave me all his money with king-eight. He just gave me fifty, sixty thousand. He had 9000 left, so I know it's, I mean, I know I'm gonna win, but I'm gonna have to just continue to play my best poker. And then he had 6-7 and I had Q-2, and he won that...and then I had him all in again and he won that, and he had me all-in one time and he won that. He won four races in a row after giving me all his chips. I mean, I feel like, uh, I feel like it wasn't, y'know, thank God it's not a World Series of Poker tournament.... It just doesn't feel fair to me. But he played good."

I thought that Voertmann was impressive throughout, clearly outplaying Hellmuth, with the exception of the one major misstep where he first lost the chip lead. He also remained above the fray, never resorting to insults or negativity in reaction to Phil's insults and tirades. He continued that pattern in his interview: "First of all, for me it feels fair. Phil, of course, is a very good player." At this point, Hellmuth interrupts: "It feels fair? Wanna play again for $100,000?" Voertmann just laughs that off and continues: "If I would say anything against Phil, it would be ridiculous. So many bracelets, he's a great player, famous player, and so I wouldn't say anything else." He goes into some detail about what his thinking was in the hand in which he lost the chip lead, then concludes, "I was wrong, I lost that hand, but at the end I was lucky."

Four players, three showing class in either victory or defeat.

And then there's Phil.

Fiasco

I'm a little behind in poker news, so just today learned about the disaster that occurred when UltimateBlecch tried to run a new heads-up tournament in honor of Annie Duke having won the NBC event. There were, uh, a few problems. Read all about it here.

This would also be a fitting time to remind everybody of what the site's other prominent spokesman has boasted of it: "We have the best software out there."

You sure about that, Phil? Looks to me like your company can't run a tournament right, even when it manages not to ship pots to the loser of the hand, or let its owners and friends play while looking at opponents' hole cards.

Steam coming out of the ears

If, like me, you enjoy watching Phil Hellmuth boast about being the best in the world and then get his face rubbed in doggie doo, I highly recommend watching this "Poker After Dark" segment, particularly the two consecutive hands between Hellmuth and Brandon Adams, starting at about the 7:00 mark. Hilarity definitely ensues.

Poker gems, #344

Phil Hellmuth, on "High Stakes Poker," season 6, episode 1:


Hellmuth: Durr [Tom Dwan] and I gamble, buddy. We put in 16,000 each when the blinds were 200 the other day. He had 10-jack, I had 9-7 offsuit.

Antonio Esfandiari: How did that work out for you?

Hellmuth: Not well.

Hellmuthian schadenfreude

"Poker After Dark" was a big cash game this week. It contained a moment that caused me as much poker schadenfreude as I have ever felt when, as you can see above from the stills, Phil Hellmuth lost his stack to Phil Ivey in a massive cooler of a hand, with P.H. flopping top set and P.I. a straight. Nuts versus second nuts. [Edit: OK, 2nd nuts versus 3rd nuts, as some commenters have correctly pointed out.]

It's hard to see how anybody could get away from that set-up without going broke, so at least this time the loss wasn't because Hellmuth did anything particularly dumb. But he so richly deserves to lose just on the basis of being such an enormous embarrassment to the game of poker that I don't really care if he takes his licks through bad play or bad luck.

Of course, he could have controlled how he handled the loss. He could have chosen to be philosophical about it and determined to continue playing his A-game. Or he could have recognized that he wouldn't be able to play as well after such an incident, or simply decided that it wasn't going to be his night, and walked away from the game (that's my usual approach). But no. He put another $100,000 on the table and donked off much of it thrashing around with his arm cut off in a tank full of sharks. He swore. He blamed the dealer and asked to have her replaced.

The schadenfreudiest part, though, was that Daniel Negreau was booking him for this session, meaning that if Hellmuth walked away winner, Negreanu would have to pay Hellmuth an amount equal to the win, but if he finished loser, Hellmuth would have to pay Negreanu the amount of the loss. The arrangement effectively doubled the magnitude of any win or loss. So from my perspective it was the perfect time for Hellmuth to get kicked in the nads by the poker gods--because it cost him twice as much.

Both before and after the loss, Hellmuth repeatedly said that he wished he could get Negreanu to book him for many such sessions. But he seemed to tune out that Negreanu was practically jumping up and down to say, "I will!"--every night for the rest of his life. In fact, Negreanu was willing to put a multiplier on the deal: book for 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x, even 30x the amount of win or loss. He is, obviously supremely confident in his assessment that Hellmuth is a huge underdog in deep-stacked cash games against a lineup such as was featured in this show (Gun Hansen, Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan, Ivey, and himself). Hellmuth's ego just won't let him hear what a deafening warning bell that judgment is.

Hellmuth obviously has an impressive record playing large-field tournaments against mostly amateur opponents. But in deep cash games against the small number of people who play the highest stakes spread day in and day out, he's a complete fish. Everybody at the table understood that fact thoroughly--except for one.

(I no longer remember who the commentator was, but during one tournament when Hellmuth was struggling against a table brimming with talent, it was noted that he is a great player against mediocre opponents, but a mediocre player against great opponents. Seems about right to me.)

I can't decide which "Rounder" quotation to close this with, since so many are applicable, so I guess I'll just list them all:

Teddy KGB: It hurts doesn't it? Your hopes dashed, your dreams down the toilet. And your fate is sitting right besides you.

Mike McDermott: [Narrating] But this isn't a gunfight. It's not about pride or ego. It's only about money.

Mike McDermott: It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.

Mike McDermott: Are you satisfied now, Teddy? Because I can keep busting you up all night if you like.

Mike McDermott: Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.