The obvious thing is he didn’t want to lose 250k, 500k, 1mm etc on stream.
When your ego is the most important thing, you don’t want to lose a milly with a million people watching.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Phil and Tom were only allowed to buy in for min and weren’t allowed to add on. Would have made the game worse if they had everyone covered and could have busted the streamers at any time.
If I were running that juicy of a game, I definitely would have used such a rule.
I’m pretty sure Tom at least bought in for 100k at one point, but might be remembering wrong.
He bought in for more than that. He had 250 in front of him.
Guys quit trying to find some reason other than Phil is really bad at poker. That’s the reason he didn’t buy in more.
The streamers literally asked him to buy in more and when asked why he didn’t he didn’t respond.
Phil is really good at tournament poker. There’s no denying that.
He’s also really bad at big NL cash games. There’s no denying that either.
As DNegs pointed out on the DAT podcast this week, as much as Phil often talks a big game about wanting to “get it all” and play deep stacked, he’s clearly more comfortable playing short and reducing the number of decisions he makes. I mean, this is a guy who has a rep for crushing amateurs, yet he often max late registers and comes in after the blinds have escalated and a lot of the dead money has already been eliminated.
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You’re mostly right - just checked and he only bought back in for 50k when he got felted, but after Botez won the monster pot he added an extra 50k to get up to 120k.
Exactly. People want to argue he is among the best ever in a game 100% about making decisions and he does everything he can to minimize the number and complexity of decisions he has to make.
A pro’s EV comes solely from making better decisions than their competition. They want more hands with more complex decisions!
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This is what I think too, and I think someone may have pointed out to the streamers that opening to huge sizings would handcuff Hellmuth and Dwan quite a bit.
He did not buy in for 250K, he bought in for way less and ran it up.
The dude has 16 bracelets, destroyed Esfandiari and Negreanu heads up, and used some pretty GTO-style strategies to do so. He adjusted really poorly to the streamer lineup, in one game, for like six hours or whatever. They probably played < 150 hands in that time.
In the game in question, it’s also debatable that buying in shorter would be better in terms of being able to limp-jam a wider range profitably. I’d probably either want to be 25K deep or 150K+ deep and being in between would be moderately annoying and hand cuff me quite a bit.
Meanwhile if you told me I was going to play a 100/200 game with a bunch of rich kids with little/no poker experience, I’d probably expect $50K (250bb) to be enough to cover the table, and I’d probably bring like $200K total. Then once I saw how big it was, I’d be kind of stuck unless I could borrow.
This is all completely wrong but I’m bored of the is hellmuth good debate. I’m content that basically every pro on earth agrees with me.
Galfond is pretty fucking good and thinks Hellmuth is good.
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No he doesn’t. At all.
He wrote up like four pages and posted them in screen shots on Twitter after Phil beat Antonio in the heads up matches about how he had a newfound respect for Phil’s game.
Look at his full twitter history. He is the nicest guy in poker. He is not going to open trash him but goes about as far as someone like him would go to mock him.
I think you guys are talking past each other to some extent. Phil is good at tournament poker. I think some of this carries over to him being at least ok at HU type events against other name pros. He’d still get crushed against a HU specialist though.
The real question is would you expect Phil to be a consistent solid winning player in big NL cash games 100/200 and higher? There’s a lot of evidence that he is not and little to no evidence that he is.
I’d expect Phil to be a winner in 100/200 NL with an amateur lineup and for his losing sessions to be tilt-filled clusterfucks.
I’d also expect any reasonable pronto say being able to but a piece of a Hellmuth WSOP package at 0% markup would be a snap buy.
Anyways, here’s something fun not relating to Clovis being obsessed with Hellmuth.
https://twitter.com/grindfacetv_/status/1521986712313860096?s=20&t=tmG50Ey6QD_N698KNFfNCA
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I agree with all of that, the last part totally depends on the lineup. With all the tech billionaires in his home game? I’m sure he does well. In a tough lineup with a bunch of cash game pros? He gets wrecked probably.
I’m pretty sure Clovis’s position is Phil sucks at all poker - including tournaments and his results are due to playing so many tournaments and getting lucky.