Phil Hellmuth has a ton of tournament success under his belt. But what about cash games? Poker Night in America investigates.
Phil Hellmuth is one of poker’s biggest names. No-one has won more WSOP bracelets than him – 15 to be exact.
While a lot of people consider him an absolute legend of the game, he is not free from criticism. Every now and then, the online poker community questions his abilities after a play he makes.
One of those instances comes from a 2017 WPT event where he folded pocket Q’s pre-flop to an all-in raise, leaving himself only 27 BB behind. Hellmuth even showed his cards before mucking them. In response his opponent showed a 4 – meaning Phil Hellmuth was way ahead.
Last year, people made fun of his decision to shove his $115K stack into a $10K pot with Aces pre-flop in a Poker After Dark cash game.
Hellmuth’s Tournament Success
“The Poker Brat” tends to explain his unusual moves with his uncanny ability to read his opponents. He calls that “white magic”.
While some are doubtful, it can’t be denied it helped him on the live tournament scene.
In addition to the aforementioned 15 gold bracelets – which includes a Main Event victory – he has accumulated over $22 million in live tournament earnings. The Wisconsin man has been having constant success at the highest level poker tournaments for over 3 decades now.
Hellmuth likes to claim he has the best poker tournament ROI in history – that is yet to be confirmed, though. His claim comes from an early Upswing Poker article. In that piece, they looked at a sample of WSOP tournaments Hellmuth played from a 10-year period and calculated that his ROI was an extremely high 250% on those events. However, that is a limited sample with size issues.
PNIA’s Investigation into Hellmuth
With all that doubt about Hellmuth in mind, Poker Night in America decided they look into Hellmuth’s cash game performance. The Poker Brat appeared on 59 episodes of the popular poker show on CBS Sports in the 6 season it’s been running. That means they have a vast hand history on him to analyze his results.
They only got through the first season Phil Hellmuth appeared in so far, season 2. He played three sessions during those shows. One PNIA session tend to be 6-8 hours, and on average around 30 hands are played per hour at a live poker table. That means they have somewhere between 500-700 hands on Hellmuth in the first part of their investigation.
Overall, Hellmuth ended the 3 sessions $1,050 in profit. PNIA cash games are played on $25/$50 stakes – that means a 21 BB net gain.
At the end of the video, Poker Night showed a confusing graphic to represent Hellmuth’s performance. Instead of the number of hands, they put the number of episodes on the other axis in their grid.
Hellmuth’s Absence from Online Poker
Evidently, you would need a lot more than a couple hundred hands to reach a conclusive verdict on someone’s cash game poker abilities.
What would help if we had a large sample of online hands that Hellmuth played. However, unlike for many big name pros, none can be found about the Poker Brat online. Hellmuth regularly played on the now defunct poker site UltimateBet, but there are no records on his results.
Some people believe that he is behind the PokerStars screen name “#1_Lucky_One”, but that remains to be confirmed.
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