Liz L.
10-27-2003, 09:39 PM
Hellmuth's 'monster' hand a blessing and a curse
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, October 27, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/27/DD246164.DTL
Garry Kasparov would never find a money chess game on a corner. Nor could Allen Iverson fleece fools in H-O-R-S-E at the local YMCA. But when Phil Hellmuth Jr. sat down at a poker table recently with $400 in chips, he watched people line up, eager to mix it up with a former world champion.
They lined up because poker is hot, because Hellmuth is hot and because this was an Internet game with a maximum $4 bet. Hellmuth was in the dining room of his Palo Alto home, wearing a golf shirt and shorts and sipping tea with honey. His wife and two boys were hanging out in the next room. Life has dealt him such a sweet hand -- in poker parlance, a "monster" -- that he is now paid, by a Web site in Antigua, to play against amateurs.
"The universe has taken really good care of me," he acknowledges, as if the universe were a casino dealer peeling off face cards. Indeed, Hellmuth, 39, has aced his profession in spite of -- and often because of -- terrible table manners. He whines about his luck, second-guesses opponents' holds and folds, berates weaker players and has an ego that is notorious even in ego-charged poker circles.
Hellmuth is loved, hated and tortured, a John McEnroe-style figure who has won nine World Series of Poker tournaments -- more than anyone else -- but says he's been in therapy for years dealing with insecurities. He's a successful man who can't help flexing his ego even as he talks about trying to muck it like a bad hand.
"When you have a big ego, it's more artificial confidence, isn't it?" he says. "But even knowing ego for what it is, my ego is still pumped up right now, and I'm aware of that. The reason my ego is so high right now is I just took No. 1 on the (all-time) money list back this year and won two tournaments.
Right now everybody's talking about me as being the best player in the world."
This much is not contested: Hellmuth is a camera magnet -- for some of the same reasons McEnroe was -- in an industry that is exploding on television and the Internet. It's a game that is developing stars but has generally attracted men who aren't interested in things like regular hours, exercise and dress codes.
Hellmuth is 6 feet 6, with the rangy frame of an ex-athlete and a bit of an accent from his Wisconsin roots. He's energetic, expressive, and a little goofy, and he often meditates before playing. He stares at opponents, playing up a gift for unmasking the stoniest of poker faces. He can put them on tilt, too.
Most important, Hellmuth might be the game's savviest businessman, poised to ride poker's surge. He has won several million dollars at the table, but plans to make more away from it.
Besides the UltimateBet.com endorsement, Hellmuth has his own Web site (philhellmuth.com) and does a twice-monthly column for Card Player magazine. He wrote a strategy book, "Play Poker Like the Pros," that he says has sold 50, 000 copies this year. He recently pitched a second book and plans to write an autobiography.
"All the strategy is perfect," he says of his maiden effort, "and because of that, maybe someday my book will become the Bible of poker."
For $10,000 plus traveling expenses, Hellmuth is selling a "Poker Night." He'll teach you and as many as 16 of your high-rolling friends how to play poker and organize a championship-style tournament, like the one he put on in Vail in August for a group of business associates. "I nailed Vail," he reported afterward.
Finally, Hellmuth says that there is a movie script called "The Madison Kid" floating around Hollywood and that he is in negotiations to star on as many as two TV shows -- one on FX and one on MTV. The concepts, he says, remain somewhat hush-hush. Of one, he says, "It's getting huge reviews by the people it's been pitched to, especially, they tell me, because I'm involved in it. There's a lot of tape out on me, and for some reason I seem to have a little charisma.
"Beer, cigars -- those would be a natural," he says, moving on to the idea of endorsements for poker players. "I'd like to have a line of shirts out. I'd like to talk to Sony and Sega about a Phil Hellmuth video game."
He talked excitedly as he sat on a couch in his house in a prestigious neighborhood, and kept an eye on his sons -- Philip III, 13, and 10-year-old Nick -- as they played with a friend in the backyard pool. Those close to him say he is a devoted father who loves setting up poker tournaments for school charities, who has donated most of his prize bracelets to loved ones, and who is not totally comfortable with his persona.
Indeed, his confidence and ambition have helped him reach the top of his profession but have also invited vitriol. Poker chat rooms on the Internet are filled with sparring between Hellmuth bashers and supporters. Hellmuth's smallest personal fouls are magnified and dissected.
"Phil's the best thing going in poker," says Steve Lipscomb, who founded the televised World Poker Tour, now on the Travel Channel, and dreams of building a brand that rivals the Professional Golfers Association. "The reason McEnroe was so interesting is because he cared so much that he couldn't help himself. Phil is so passionate about what he does."
Diego Cordovez, a fellow Palo Alto resident who might be the area's second- best player, remembers the first time he met Hellmuth, several years ago. Cordovez, 38, was in one of his first tournaments. "I raised him a couple of times, and he said, 'Do you know who you're f-- with?' " The two later became friends.
"I like and respect Phil a lot. He has integrity," says Cordovez, who recently started a company to develop Internet poker software. "But to some extent I think Phil drives himself crazy. He consciously tries to exude confidence. That's a legitimate tactic. But he has a steaming problem, and his play drops when he's enraged."
When Hellmuth was busted out of a World Poker Tour event in Colma last year by 24-year-old San Francisco resident Antonio Esfandiari, the young player waved his arms. The microphone caught Hellmuth telling Esfandiari -- whom he had once hired to perform magic at a party at his home -- "Show some class and shake my hand, kid."
But in an interview, while talking about some recent tournament hands, Hellmuth paused and said, "Am I going to complain about fair? I have perfect health, my wife and kids have perfect health, my parents have perfect health, my brothers and sisters have perfect health."
It has taken Hellmuth a long time to gain perspective on poker, a game that has tapped his greatest strengths -- and weaknesses.
He grew up in Madison, Wis., the oldest of five children in a family that is so ambitious that two years ago it was the subject of a story in the Wisconsin State Journal newspaper titled "This Family Piles Up Accomplishments. " His father is a master swimmer who was assistant dean at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and his mother is a sculptor. One sister has practiced law, worked with the Peace Corps in New Guinea and raced bikes professionally; another won a gold medal in swimming in the Special Olympics.
Hellmuth, though, was a sensitive child whose self-esteem was pounded when he developed hundreds of warts on his hands.
"It was horrible. For two years in high school I couldn't show anyone my hands because I was too embarrassed," he says. "My grades were nothing to talk about; I didn't have a lot of friends. I came out of it with low self-esteem, which explains somewhat the ego that I've developed."
Hellmuth also believes his sensitivity as a child contributes to his "feel" -- his ability to judge what other players are holding. He doesn't look for clear "tells" -- a player adjusting a ring or biting a lip. Rather he uses pieces of information -- players' level of experience, their number of chips, their past bets and past hands -- to form a context for the next move.
As a child he was always watching others, and how they were regarding him. "People just make sense to me, you know?" he says. "I know when they're lying."
Hellmuth's almost comic-book transformation, from an awkward teen to a young gun in a romanticized world, started in the student union at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He joined a regular game of Hold'em, in which players used Austrian coins to disguise the gambling. There, he met his mentor, a Las Vegas native who advised him to play "tight" by folding all but the strongest starting hands.
In no-limit Texas Hold'em, each player is dealt two hole cards. Then comes the "flop," or three face-up communal cards. A fourth communal card is the "turn," and a fifth is the "river." Players bet after each step, and the best five-card hand wins. At any point, a person can go "all-in," betting every chip.
Hellmuth played "super-tight," and started to win, then found bigger games at private homes in the area. By 21 he had paid off all of his student loans and had $20,000 in the bank, and school was less interesting.
One day he won $6,500 in a professional game in nearby LaCrosse. The next day he dropped all of his classes. He was leaving his father's school to become a professional gambler, of all things. "Can you imagine?" he says. Family dinners often ended with Hellmuth storming out after poker came up.
But by 24, Hellmuth was rolling. After he won two tournaments in Los Angeles, he bought himself a Cadillac. Then the father came around and told his son that he wanted to be with him at the 1989 World Series of Poker. There, he woke his son up every day at noon with breakfast.
At that time, Johnny Chan ruled poker. He had won the World Series for two years straight and had just been exalted in the poker movie "Rounders." After four days, 175 players had been eliminated, and Chan and Hellmuth were head-to- head. Hellmuth, who had the chip lead, says he whispered to Chan, "I'm going to play perfect poker. The only way you can beat me is to play perfect poker and get lucky."
On the final hand, Hellmuth was dealt a pair of black nines; Chan had the ace and the seven of spades. Hellmuth (a 2 1/2-to-1 favorite) went all-in, and Chan called. The flop delivered king-king-10. The turn was a queen, the river a six. Hellmuth's two pairs held up and he was the youngest world champ ever.
"I'll remember that last card for the rest of my life," he says. He won $755,000, embraced his father, then bought him a Mercedes.
"Now the jokes start that Phil's head was so big he couldn't walk through the door on the way out," Hellmuth recalls. "I had to do that at that point in my life -- I had to become a little unbearable. I had to go from this little bit of self-esteem to this massive ego, because I didn't have enough confidence."
Hellmuth says that back then, he never could have opened up about his fragile self-image. But he did make some important choices: He stayed away from games of chance like craps -- poker players call them "leaks" -- after some early losses. He never drank much or did drugs. And soon after his world championship, he started a family. "I think we keep his balloon from flying up into outer space," Katherine says.
Katherine, a doctor, was in medical school in Madison when she met Hellmuth,
who lived in her apartment building and headed her off at the laundry room. He told her he was a pro poker player, and almost didn't get a first date. "You know, I'm thinking he's a drug addict, a compulsive gambler," she recalls.
"I don't want to hurt his feelings, but how am I going to get out of this?"
She didn't. "I saw him to a large extent as a diamond in the rough," Katherine says. For years, he talked incessantly about himself, and his outbursts at poker tournaments could be "incredibly embarrassing." But he was honest, sincere, ethical, ambitious and, perhaps most important, willing to open himself to looking at his flaws, she says.
At one point, Katherine gave him an ultimatum: She couldn't devote her life to someone incapable of empathy. He started to change, even seeing a therapist.
"I love it -- that's an hour a week where I get to just talk about me," he jokes.
What Hellmuth, who plays in about 80 poker tournaments a year, really wants is a legacy. The man whom some people love to hate says he "has a chance to be truly loved in my profession." In an interview, he mentioned tennis player Andre Agassi, not McEnroe.
"The more I grow as a human being, the better poker player I become," he says. "That being said, sometimes I act like I'm 12. . . . If you say I whine and cry at the table, fine, I'm working on it. I'm trying to become a better man. I'll be playing until I'm in my 70s. I have time to mature."
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, October 27, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/27/DD246164.DTL
Garry Kasparov would never find a money chess game on a corner. Nor could Allen Iverson fleece fools in H-O-R-S-E at the local YMCA. But when Phil Hellmuth Jr. sat down at a poker table recently with $400 in chips, he watched people line up, eager to mix it up with a former world champion.
They lined up because poker is hot, because Hellmuth is hot and because this was an Internet game with a maximum $4 bet. Hellmuth was in the dining room of his Palo Alto home, wearing a golf shirt and shorts and sipping tea with honey. His wife and two boys were hanging out in the next room. Life has dealt him such a sweet hand -- in poker parlance, a "monster" -- that he is now paid, by a Web site in Antigua, to play against amateurs.
"The universe has taken really good care of me," he acknowledges, as if the universe were a casino dealer peeling off face cards. Indeed, Hellmuth, 39, has aced his profession in spite of -- and often because of -- terrible table manners. He whines about his luck, second-guesses opponents' holds and folds, berates weaker players and has an ego that is notorious even in ego-charged poker circles.
Hellmuth is loved, hated and tortured, a John McEnroe-style figure who has won nine World Series of Poker tournaments -- more than anyone else -- but says he's been in therapy for years dealing with insecurities. He's a successful man who can't help flexing his ego even as he talks about trying to muck it like a bad hand.
"When you have a big ego, it's more artificial confidence, isn't it?" he says. "But even knowing ego for what it is, my ego is still pumped up right now, and I'm aware of that. The reason my ego is so high right now is I just took No. 1 on the (all-time) money list back this year and won two tournaments.
Right now everybody's talking about me as being the best player in the world."
This much is not contested: Hellmuth is a camera magnet -- for some of the same reasons McEnroe was -- in an industry that is exploding on television and the Internet. It's a game that is developing stars but has generally attracted men who aren't interested in things like regular hours, exercise and dress codes.
Hellmuth is 6 feet 6, with the rangy frame of an ex-athlete and a bit of an accent from his Wisconsin roots. He's energetic, expressive, and a little goofy, and he often meditates before playing. He stares at opponents, playing up a gift for unmasking the stoniest of poker faces. He can put them on tilt, too.
Most important, Hellmuth might be the game's savviest businessman, poised to ride poker's surge. He has won several million dollars at the table, but plans to make more away from it.
Besides the UltimateBet.com endorsement, Hellmuth has his own Web site (philhellmuth.com) and does a twice-monthly column for Card Player magazine. He wrote a strategy book, "Play Poker Like the Pros," that he says has sold 50, 000 copies this year. He recently pitched a second book and plans to write an autobiography.
"All the strategy is perfect," he says of his maiden effort, "and because of that, maybe someday my book will become the Bible of poker."
For $10,000 plus traveling expenses, Hellmuth is selling a "Poker Night." He'll teach you and as many as 16 of your high-rolling friends how to play poker and organize a championship-style tournament, like the one he put on in Vail in August for a group of business associates. "I nailed Vail," he reported afterward.
Finally, Hellmuth says that there is a movie script called "The Madison Kid" floating around Hollywood and that he is in negotiations to star on as many as two TV shows -- one on FX and one on MTV. The concepts, he says, remain somewhat hush-hush. Of one, he says, "It's getting huge reviews by the people it's been pitched to, especially, they tell me, because I'm involved in it. There's a lot of tape out on me, and for some reason I seem to have a little charisma.
"Beer, cigars -- those would be a natural," he says, moving on to the idea of endorsements for poker players. "I'd like to have a line of shirts out. I'd like to talk to Sony and Sega about a Phil Hellmuth video game."
He talked excitedly as he sat on a couch in his house in a prestigious neighborhood, and kept an eye on his sons -- Philip III, 13, and 10-year-old Nick -- as they played with a friend in the backyard pool. Those close to him say he is a devoted father who loves setting up poker tournaments for school charities, who has donated most of his prize bracelets to loved ones, and who is not totally comfortable with his persona.
Indeed, his confidence and ambition have helped him reach the top of his profession but have also invited vitriol. Poker chat rooms on the Internet are filled with sparring between Hellmuth bashers and supporters. Hellmuth's smallest personal fouls are magnified and dissected.
"Phil's the best thing going in poker," says Steve Lipscomb, who founded the televised World Poker Tour, now on the Travel Channel, and dreams of building a brand that rivals the Professional Golfers Association. "The reason McEnroe was so interesting is because he cared so much that he couldn't help himself. Phil is so passionate about what he does."
Diego Cordovez, a fellow Palo Alto resident who might be the area's second- best player, remembers the first time he met Hellmuth, several years ago. Cordovez, 38, was in one of his first tournaments. "I raised him a couple of times, and he said, 'Do you know who you're f-- with?' " The two later became friends.
"I like and respect Phil a lot. He has integrity," says Cordovez, who recently started a company to develop Internet poker software. "But to some extent I think Phil drives himself crazy. He consciously tries to exude confidence. That's a legitimate tactic. But he has a steaming problem, and his play drops when he's enraged."
When Hellmuth was busted out of a World Poker Tour event in Colma last year by 24-year-old San Francisco resident Antonio Esfandiari, the young player waved his arms. The microphone caught Hellmuth telling Esfandiari -- whom he had once hired to perform magic at a party at his home -- "Show some class and shake my hand, kid."
But in an interview, while talking about some recent tournament hands, Hellmuth paused and said, "Am I going to complain about fair? I have perfect health, my wife and kids have perfect health, my parents have perfect health, my brothers and sisters have perfect health."
It has taken Hellmuth a long time to gain perspective on poker, a game that has tapped his greatest strengths -- and weaknesses.
He grew up in Madison, Wis., the oldest of five children in a family that is so ambitious that two years ago it was the subject of a story in the Wisconsin State Journal newspaper titled "This Family Piles Up Accomplishments. " His father is a master swimmer who was assistant dean at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and his mother is a sculptor. One sister has practiced law, worked with the Peace Corps in New Guinea and raced bikes professionally; another won a gold medal in swimming in the Special Olympics.
Hellmuth, though, was a sensitive child whose self-esteem was pounded when he developed hundreds of warts on his hands.
"It was horrible. For two years in high school I couldn't show anyone my hands because I was too embarrassed," he says. "My grades were nothing to talk about; I didn't have a lot of friends. I came out of it with low self-esteem, which explains somewhat the ego that I've developed."
Hellmuth also believes his sensitivity as a child contributes to his "feel" -- his ability to judge what other players are holding. He doesn't look for clear "tells" -- a player adjusting a ring or biting a lip. Rather he uses pieces of information -- players' level of experience, their number of chips, their past bets and past hands -- to form a context for the next move.
As a child he was always watching others, and how they were regarding him. "People just make sense to me, you know?" he says. "I know when they're lying."
Hellmuth's almost comic-book transformation, from an awkward teen to a young gun in a romanticized world, started in the student union at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He joined a regular game of Hold'em, in which players used Austrian coins to disguise the gambling. There, he met his mentor, a Las Vegas native who advised him to play "tight" by folding all but the strongest starting hands.
In no-limit Texas Hold'em, each player is dealt two hole cards. Then comes the "flop," or three face-up communal cards. A fourth communal card is the "turn," and a fifth is the "river." Players bet after each step, and the best five-card hand wins. At any point, a person can go "all-in," betting every chip.
Hellmuth played "super-tight," and started to win, then found bigger games at private homes in the area. By 21 he had paid off all of his student loans and had $20,000 in the bank, and school was less interesting.
One day he won $6,500 in a professional game in nearby LaCrosse. The next day he dropped all of his classes. He was leaving his father's school to become a professional gambler, of all things. "Can you imagine?" he says. Family dinners often ended with Hellmuth storming out after poker came up.
But by 24, Hellmuth was rolling. After he won two tournaments in Los Angeles, he bought himself a Cadillac. Then the father came around and told his son that he wanted to be with him at the 1989 World Series of Poker. There, he woke his son up every day at noon with breakfast.
At that time, Johnny Chan ruled poker. He had won the World Series for two years straight and had just been exalted in the poker movie "Rounders." After four days, 175 players had been eliminated, and Chan and Hellmuth were head-to- head. Hellmuth, who had the chip lead, says he whispered to Chan, "I'm going to play perfect poker. The only way you can beat me is to play perfect poker and get lucky."
On the final hand, Hellmuth was dealt a pair of black nines; Chan had the ace and the seven of spades. Hellmuth (a 2 1/2-to-1 favorite) went all-in, and Chan called. The flop delivered king-king-10. The turn was a queen, the river a six. Hellmuth's two pairs held up and he was the youngest world champ ever.
"I'll remember that last card for the rest of my life," he says. He won $755,000, embraced his father, then bought him a Mercedes.
"Now the jokes start that Phil's head was so big he couldn't walk through the door on the way out," Hellmuth recalls. "I had to do that at that point in my life -- I had to become a little unbearable. I had to go from this little bit of self-esteem to this massive ego, because I didn't have enough confidence."
Hellmuth says that back then, he never could have opened up about his fragile self-image. But he did make some important choices: He stayed away from games of chance like craps -- poker players call them "leaks" -- after some early losses. He never drank much or did drugs. And soon after his world championship, he started a family. "I think we keep his balloon from flying up into outer space," Katherine says.
Katherine, a doctor, was in medical school in Madison when she met Hellmuth,
who lived in her apartment building and headed her off at the laundry room. He told her he was a pro poker player, and almost didn't get a first date. "You know, I'm thinking he's a drug addict, a compulsive gambler," she recalls.
"I don't want to hurt his feelings, but how am I going to get out of this?"
She didn't. "I saw him to a large extent as a diamond in the rough," Katherine says. For years, he talked incessantly about himself, and his outbursts at poker tournaments could be "incredibly embarrassing." But he was honest, sincere, ethical, ambitious and, perhaps most important, willing to open himself to looking at his flaws, she says.
At one point, Katherine gave him an ultimatum: She couldn't devote her life to someone incapable of empathy. He started to change, even seeing a therapist.
"I love it -- that's an hour a week where I get to just talk about me," he jokes.
What Hellmuth, who plays in about 80 poker tournaments a year, really wants is a legacy. The man whom some people love to hate says he "has a chance to be truly loved in my profession." In an interview, he mentioned tennis player Andre Agassi, not McEnroe.
"The more I grow as a human being, the better poker player I become," he says. "That being said, sometimes I act like I'm 12. . . . If you say I whine and cry at the table, fine, I'm working on it. I'm trying to become a better man. I'll be playing until I'm in my 70s. I have time to mature."