So why are you arguing Phil is bad at cash games?
Because, as mentioned multiple times, I know that cash and tournament poker are different enough games that you can be great at one and not great at the other.
argh this is hard.
phil plays cash game with Steph Curry, Chamath and every silicon valley moron with billions. He makes more money playing cash games than he ever did playing tournaments.
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Most important part of winning poker: Game selection.
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i don’t disagree. hellmuth is a fucking genius.
but CN is giving contradicting argument as to why he’s a genius. It’s not because he was runner up wsop poy
I don’t see how this is relevant to what we’re talking about.
PH is a great tournament player, his results speak for themselves and that’s an open field. You just don’t have the results he’s had over decades without being very good.
I don’t think he’s a great cash player. However, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t one of the best players in the Silicon Valley game that you’re referencing (I have no idea what you’re talking about). Furthermore, in the example you brought up, that nit in your home game was playing the best poker at that table.
i’m 100% positive he’s the best player in his silicon valley home game. Which means he makes more money playing cash game than he does playing tournaments. which means your entire argument is false and you keep not understanding it.
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I continue to not follow your line of thinking at all. I don’t think you’re following mine either. Have a good one.
Some have theorized that he plays a super nit on televised cash games so that he can easily ramp up the aggression and steamroll his Silicon Valley lineups. He’s almost cartoonishly nitty in the last few TV cash games I’ve seen (PAD and HSP), so maybe there’s some truth to it.
Hellmuth isn’t great at poker theory. He’s very good at exploitative play vs weak players and game selection.
Would you rather have that skill set or the reverse?
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but i do follow yours. it’s not my first rodeo.
you say:
a) phil is a great tournament players because of results (which you do not really have, other than volume based, but whatever)
b) phil is not great cash game player because of results (which you do not really have, you just saw him play what is just unarguably terrible poker on TV)
and you are fine with that argument because it require no further knowledge or thinking. the stark difference in the two hellmuths is settled in your mind in a way that doesn’t require further thinking.
but once you add
c) phil actually wins MUCH MORE MONEY playing cash games than he does tournaments
it makes the relation between argument a and argument b meaningless.
once that relation is meaningless, your entire argument is meaningless.
“good at game selection” makes it sound like people have game choices and he makes better ones. he’s not “good at game selection”. he’s amazing at self marketing and has a very specific impossible to mimic personality that allows him to play in those games.
it’s not like someone else is like “i’ll play the toughest fields, fuck those hedge funders”.
that skill is worth more than any poker knowledge, undoubtedly
.
the ‘very good at exploitative play’ is overestimated.
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His greatest skillset by far is self-marketing.
If he hadn’t been perfectly positioned to capitalize on the poker boom due to age and skillfully crafting an image as the poker brat everyone loves to see lose, then his skillz at exploiting weak players and game selection wouldn’t matter too much.
In my situation and I’m sure 99.9% of other players, we would absolutely take being better at poker theory.
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This post alternates between ‘but you don’t have full results’ and then assumes something you definitely don’t have full results on.
If you want to disagree with me that’s totally fine. I’ll continue to think that Phil’s public tournament results make it very likely he’s an elite tournament poker player and not as great because of his public cash game play against other well known players.
The fact that PH may crush some super high stakes private game where he plays against a very select field instead of the open field of WSOP tournaments does not change those things. You don’t follow my line of thinking at all.
Anyone who plays online poker for a living plays more tournament on a week (most do on a sunday) than Phil plays each year.
You can watch him play hundreds of hands that are literally lighting money on fire on televised tournaments.
Thinking that Phil Hellmuth has found a secret, magical way to play poker (which is literally what he claims) that not a single soul on the planet understands and therefore no one can analyze it is beyond me.
What would be the expectation for bracelet wins if someone like Negreanu or one of the tournament wizards today played the exact same WSOP events as Hellmuth? I’d have to think somewhere around 10-12, maybe more. Obviously it wouldn’t be fair to give a tournament wizard the same skill level they have now compared to 25 years ago, so you’d have to factor that in.
I’d say he’s probably an above average NLHE tourney player, but definitely not elite, who had the perfect window to rack up as many bracelets as possible. On top of that, he was never quite good enough to focus on cash games, so whereas better players were making much more in cash games, he could devote himself 100% to winning as many bracelets as possible. And finally, probably an element of luck and exceeded his expectation for bracelets by a couple.
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Negreanu has a bet with Hellmuth now that he won’t be profitable over 50 Aria $25K events. It’s a lol sample size of course, but any live tournament bet going to be small sample.
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When you’ve already made 8 figures that’s not important to Hellmuth though. Hellmuth isn’t playing with rich bay area people because he’s worried about his hourly. He likes hanging out with those people. It is obviously 1000x more enjoyable than a normal poker game as well.
That bet is wildly +EV for Negreanu imo.
How many 25k events does the Aria even hold? Seems like it could take years to settle.
Hellmuth is probably elite or close to it at the niche of large, rec-filled NLHE tournaments. You don’t have to be as good to be elite at that niche vs NL tournaments in general.