Phil Helmuth Problem

As some of you may now know, apparently Phil Helmuth (who uses the same four letters at the end of his last name as I use for mine) threw a little tempter tantrum at The Bike yesterday. Now the purpose of this post is not to discuss his tempter. (If any of you want to do that I would suggest our News, Views, and Gossip forum.) But to talk about the reasons he doesn't seem to do as well as he use to in the tournaments (and thus gets mad). I believe there are three of them


1. Regression to the mean. When Phil first burst on the scene, he did incredibly well. Could much of this had been because he was just lucky and not as skillful as he thinks?


2. Tougher Competition in general. As the years have passed, it seems that there are more good tournament players than ever. Thus the edge he might have once had is perhaps reduced even though he may be playing the tournaments as well as ever?


3. Opponents adjusting to him. David Sklansky in his book [i]Tournament Poker for Advanced Players[i/] addresses in detail something he calls the Gap Concept. David explains why tournament players should use a big gap, generally a bigger gap than what the experts in the side games use. However, if you know your opponent uses this very large gap, you should begin to call (and raise) him more. If this is what is happening to Phil, I would expect his edge to be reduced even though he might be playing as good as ever.


All comments are welcome.


Mason

Mason,


Whether or not luck has caught up to him is hard to say, it's certainly a possibility, but difficult to quantify.


The competition has certainly become tougher, although I wasn't in the poker world 10 years ago, I think it's well understood.


I believe the key factor is twofold. First, I'm sure his opponents have adjusted to him. Players got better and are not as impressed with him as in the past. Second, as I pointed out in a previous post about on July 4th titled "What's up with Phil?", I believe his thought process is flawed and that he underestimates his opponents, and overestimates his skills. This has the effect that he is somewhat weak-tight and passes up too many good +EV opportunities, because he says that his skills can make up for them later in the tournament. To some degree, he can be right, but some of these +EV situations, I believe, noone in the poker world is good enough to pass.


Also, his columns in Cardplayer often discuss this tendency and I believe smart players (and I'm not talking superstars here, just solid players), are simply applying counter strategies to his thought process. Surely I would not know about it if I hadn't read it in Cardplayer. If a guy folds a flopped open-end str8-flush draw and 2 overcards and to make things worse shows it before folding, and writes about it in a magazine column, there's something very wrong in his strategy.


I also think Phil's ego is so big, and he prouds himself on all the super folds he makes, just read his column, that it hurts his chances considerably. You know, we never read about all the times he folded the best hand.


Nicolas

This post would be a lot of fun to discuss in the psychology forum. I hope you repost it there. I agree with all three of your points.


Hellmuth got very lucky early and became spoiled. Plus Michael Konik has written that Hellmuth had very low self-esteem while in college just a few short years before. The worst thing that can happen to a low self-esteeming young poker player is to get lucky early on.


As John Feeney has pointed out, people with low self-esteem will tend to credit skill for a winning streak and be very ready to blame bad luck while on losing streaks. In a way, Hellmuth is the unluckiest person on the tournament trail because of this. His early victories were a curse that has led to some serious disortions.


I mean, the guy "beat the legendary Oriental Express" and became the youngest player to win the WSOP. This is too much for a low self-esteem to handle. Much too much.

...egocentric, always whining poker brat that may now come to the realization that he is not as good as he thinks he is: that he is not really a pure-bred but a.....

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HELMUTT?

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But also, tournaments are tougher to win not so much because of better competition, but because there are more entrants. Think (and calculate if you are not as lazy as me) about how much more difficult a feat it would be for a player to repeat as WSOP champ when there are 650 entrants a year than when there are less than 200 as when JC did it. Or a Legends type tournament $5000 buy-in chanpionship may have had 40-50 players, now will have 200+ (thanks largely to the prevalence of satellites IMO).


Also, for what it's worth, Hellmuth seemed to be doing OK at this year's WSOP while I was there -- several final tables if I recall correctly.

No doubt there are a lot of reasons, not least of which I agree with Nic in that telling the whole world that you will pass a straight flush draw with two overcards against a single opponent is bound to affect your results at this level.


One other is that it just does not pay to antagonise your opponents, whether deliberately or not. Players will try harder not to be eliminated by you, and at this level any "needle" is unlikely to affect opponents' judgement adversely.


I remember reading somewhere, God knows where it might have been on here, that someone was asked why he took such a long time over a particular decision. His reply was that he was making absolutely sure that his decision was based only on poker reasons and not on his dislike of his opponent. At the top level, antagonising the opposition can only hurt you IMO.


Andy.

By my reckoning Helmuth uses the same last FIVE letters as Malmuth.


Anyway, I think Phil expects too much. The good tournament player's edge is smaller than most people realise.


Furthermore, with specific reference to the WSOP main event, since I first learned about poker, in 1995, the duration of the event has increased from four days to five (up 20 per cent), while the number of players has risen 100 per cent.


It's all very well playing for long term survival, as people could back then, but what happens if there are maniacs with large stacks all crashing into each other? I remember reading about the progress of Henry Nowakowski in the world series two years ago (when Carlos Mortenen won).


I said to myself that I should quit playing tournaments if this man could become world champion. He was a huge chip leader and managed to blow it away, but it was incredible how long he lasted.


David