Anyone who watches poker on TV knows that Phil Hellmuth is the ultimate sore loser. Those of us who followed poker before TV got ahold of it have known that for years, and we've also taken a good deal of delight in watching Paul Phillips make fun of Hellmuth. You can always amuse yourself by reading Hellmuth's columns in Card Player, where he routinely indulges his ego and makes an ass of himself. Phillips has a bit of fun with his latest column here, wherein Hellmuth actually criticizes someone else for poor etiquette. Another irony meter bites the dust.
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From CardPlayer magazine's live updates from the $5000 buy-in No Limit Hold Em tournament:
According to this site, Phil Hellmuth is going to be on the next season of The Surreal Life along with Randy "Macho Man" Savage and, allegedly, Carrot Top.
I don't think this has gotten much attention, but I think it's important to publicize it. There's a scandal going on in the poker world over a tournament going on right now, the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions.
This is a post about the World Series of Poker, but there are no spoilers in it
I'm normally a mild mannered guy, but Hellmuth is one of those people who makes me angry just by being there.
Here's a great quote from one of his columns, via a commenter at Paul Phillips's blog: "I'm starting to feel that I'm super unlucky in all of the events I've been playing for a long time."
I have been around the poker scene for a long time, not so much as a player but as an investor of friends who were professionals from the late 60's through the 80's. I still retain a great interest and follow the various tournament scenes, etc. One of the things i have noticed has been the affects of the generations on the games. The last of the old WW2 boys is hanging by a thread or two of Fates woven strands, those good old boys who grew up in back rooms of cities all over the world and came out occassionally to play at Binions or Harrahs(they are still heroes in my book). My generation, the boomers now in our 50's, never really had the best seats as the growth of the game came just a little too late to cover all the pots that were still going to the older dudes. The boomers in Europe and South America were doing much better than those here. Those in their middle years now(35-50), were that same arrogant bunch of ME-X generation sorts who had sharp calculating minds, and were riding the first postive inflows of cash into tournament waves. They got big heads, but could play well enough to take the cash away from the boomers and the old guard. Until the youth came in and now are sitting at final tables all over the place. They cover the gambit, from wild emotional performers to deeply calculating thinkers. The diversity of ages at tables is good for the game in terms of balancing the "reads" of the older players w/ the sharp intellectual minds of the young ones. Hard to read someone you haven't seen play knowing they are running permutations of probabilities w/ greater variables than one imagined one could do?? It is a damn good thing so many people w/ $$ think they can actually play the game, otherwise my generation wouldn't be finding any opportunities anymore to access some easy cashflow.