In this video, Phil Helmuth is raised all-in, calls, and appears to be stunned by his opponent’s cards and the fact that she was willing to call his pre-flop raise.
Which has me puzzled. I’m a mere dabbler in poker, whereas PH is clearly among the best ever. But I can’t see why he should be amazed at this call (a view clearly shared by the announcers).
Can someone explain what he’s on about here?
He’s a whiner. You are right. She was in late position and although I only watched it once - it looked like she had more than enough of a stack to cover his. You have to pick people off - which is what she was doing. It was almost a semi bluff - she was probably half expecting (and would have been happy with) him to fold when she went all in. He didn’t and the semi-part of the bluff paid off for her. In a normal ring game - or even earlier in the tournament - she wouldn’t have done that.
Near as I can tell he’s shocked she didn’t have an ace with that much on the line. He played the hand the way most pros would assuming the opponent would bail without at least an ace + a good kicker and when the flop came he was shocked she played the suited KQ.
She rolled the dice and won, it irked him.
Just to be clear, she never raised him, but Shak did put him all in when she was out of position. It’s evident he thought she was bluffing the Q, which was a bit of a blind spot…AQ and she likely reraises/shoves, QJ or worse it’s a tough call for her, but KQ seems completely reasonable to me.
You are right of course, I miswatched it the first time :). On rewatching - her stack IS huge compared to his - she was in late position and it was late in the game. She had him more than enough covered where even if he had won - she wouldn’t have been THAT much worse off.
Real poker doesn’t have a “flop.”
“No true poker player” fallacy. Nice, it just may upset the Scotsmen though.
Phil got outflopped, that’s all. He’s also a very tight player. (tighter than most young-guns)
Hellmuth is a whiner and is well known for being the worst loser in pro poker.
Here he is playing the identical hand (KQ of hearts) in a much worse position than she was in. He called a raise and then a re-raise with the board paired and lost 2/3 of his stack instead of laying down KQ suited. It was a far worse play than he criticized her for making.
Technically, she wasn’t in late position, she was the big blind. The way the action goes pre-flop, she’s the last to be able to raise, but after the flop she’s one of the first to act.
Given that she had 40k of her chips in the pot already, putting another 80k into the pot to call Phil was a pretty easy bet with KQ suited.
Noob question if you don’t mind me asking - why are they showing their 2 cards (hole cards?) prior to the final 2 community cards being turned over? I thought that the betting that accompanies these two final cards was integral to the game, and then you would only reveal your hand right at the end?
Thanks - don’t really know the rules.
No, I’ve given up on ‘poker’ meaning anything but THE. By numbers, ‘true poker players’ are those who play the community games, and those of us who prefer the more traditional forms are curmudgeons, second-class citz, and SOL.
Phil Hellmuth is being ridiculous in that clip. Folding KQs preflop from the BB against a 3x raise when you are closing the action would be VERY tight.
The only odd thing about the hand is her shove on the flop. With top par second best kicker and a stack-to-pot-ratio of ~2 the standard play is to check/raise and allow Phil to bluff. When she overbet shoves the flop she is robbing Phil of the chance to bluff, or valuebet worse hands, and therefore losing a lot of value.
Her mistake wasn’t calling preflop, but shoving the flop. Check/raising, check/calling and leading out small are all better options.
Since Phil is all in on the flop, there can be no betting on the later streets. Nowadays it is common practise in tournaments to turn your hands face up when no more betting is possible, because it makes for better entertainment.
Like others have said, Phil Helmuth is a whiner. But a good portion of the time, the whining is an act. He likes to push his opponents off their game, put them on tilt, and generally make them uncomfortable and, therefore, play in a sub-par manner. To that end, he’ll scream and berate a player or go off on a rant specifically to accomplish that.
That it also garners him attention and therefore name recognition and therefore sponsorships and therefore money is just the super sweet icing on the cake.
I realize I’m speaking from an antiquated and obscure position, but the notion of poker being played as a spectator sport just boggles me. I could live with it, I guess, if TV speed poker hadn’t all but killed the traditional forms.
“Traditional”? You do understand, I hope, that the most popular community poker game, Texas Hold 'Em, started out in Texas over a century ago now? And that it was chosen to be the WSOP championship game by the players themselves back in '72, well before it was a glamorous, fast-paced televised game?
Granted, Omaha is actually relatively new, only 30-40 years old - which still makes the early practitioners grandparents.
Unless you’re a centenarian, it’s hard to see how espousing “traditional” poker forms that are more than 150 years old vs the “new” community card games that are “only” 100 years old reflects any curmudgeonly behavior instead of just contrarianism.
Actually, it’s done to prevent chip dumping.
I’m aware that most forms of poker go back to early days, and that the (then relatively insular and obscure) tournament crowd preferred the community games. However, ten years ago or so, “poker” meant the traditional individual-hand games in nine conversations out of ten. The glamming of poker as a TV sport, where stud and draw would produce a snooze-fest, completely reversed the term. Try ANY poker search now and Google will return 20 THE/Omaha hits for any related to stud/draw/individual hand games. Try finding a friendly social game that isn’t community. (I haven’t found one in over five years.) Or - here’s an easy one - try to find a smartphone app for non-community versions. On Android, there are dozens of high-rated THE games and hundreds of lesser versions; there is one draw poker sim, and despite being truly excellent, the author had to add in THE houses to get his sales past a few hundred.
I don’t have anything against THE, Omaha, etc., but I don’t care for the community games, and I resent that their glamorizing has almost completely eliminated the individual-hand forms in every venue.
But then, I prefer baseball to football, too - and I think the comparison is exact. One is subtle, slow-paced, and depends on non-obvious skills and efforts; the other is fast, loud, timed, and subject to endless kibitzing about play, strategy, game stage, etc. No misunderstanding why THE is the preferred version for spectating.
Here’s the summary of the tournament FT, from the WSOP site. It was the 3k NLHE event from 2007.
I found the 3x UTG by Hellmuth with ~11BBs weird, but I guess the minraise trend hadn’t yet taken root. I’m also not sure why she felt she had to call with KQs. 3x is roughly 28-30% of Phil’s stack. He’s not quite classically committed to the pot (thought that needed 1/3 of your chips), but he’s awfully close. Would I really want to go all-in, putting at risk 1/3 of my chip bully stack, (she had about 38 BBs, near as I can reconstruct the action) with KQs, especially since Phil’s not open shoving, but he’s 3x’ing? I’d be guessing he openshoves a much wider range than he 3xs, as short as he was. Does she think he even has a 3x r/f range UTG with 11BBs? I don’t. Plan on it all going in on the flop at the latest. So, were I Shak, I’d be really suspicious that Hellmuth was screwing around with a monster. It turned out he was just being unique, but I wouldn’t count on that.
KQs doesn’t do very well pf versus a monster range like QQ+, AKs. (It’s a 78/22 dog.) But, but; “I’m getting 2.5 to 1 on my money!” She’s putting up 80k to close the action, and potentially win 210k (60k in blinds, 30k in antes, 120k of Hellmuth’s money) That’s actually 2.625 to 1, but whatev. She needs 27.6% equity to continue profitably. You’ve got to add some non-dominated PPs to Phil’s range or widen it to include AJs, AQo, in order for KQs to get that equity pf. So we do that. Even after that QT6 rainbow board, though, she’s still a 56.5/43.5 dog. Fine for calling a pot-sized shove on the flop from Phil, but we’re still not greatly thrilled about the whole thing. Why even get into this predicament pre, especially since you’re in a world of hurt the 2/3 of the time you don’t flop a pair? Just fold. Save your stack for bullying other people, not for calling out of position with big RIO hands like KQs. So her calling is strange to me.
I’ve no idea why Hellmuth didn’t just open shove. A reasonable Nash push/fold range for each position can be calculated from the tournament payouts and their chip totals, all of which can be found at the WSOP link above. Inputting them into a free Nash NHLE calculator, yields a UTG push range for Phil of 16.6%, and ATs is comfortably within that range. Shak’s BB range from that calculation, for a call of Hellmuth’s hypothetical UTG shove, is 10.1%, which is close, (Other equity calculators, such as pokerstove, include KQs within a 10% range.) but this Nash calculator excludes KQs from that 10% range, making up the difference with more pairs and ATo. If he shoves, he adds, in all likelihood, another ~20% to his stack. Even if he gets called, he’s got blockers to another ace hand: he’s only really in trouble if it’s AJ+, TT+, and there are only 60 combos of those floating around, or about 5% of all combos. The odds of getting through 5 people without one of them having one of those combos is .951^5, or around 78%. Why screw around with 3x’ing? Jesus, you might actually get called!
From Hellmuth’s point-of-view, assuming he thinks she’s a decent player (she may very well be; all I remember reading about her is her divorce and gargantuan shoe collection), a call OOP against my large open would start ringing alarm bells. Effective stacks are way too shallow to setmine or play SCs, he looks committed, so all of the money’s going in anyway, so the only reason I’d think she wouldn’t shove over my open would be that she was trying to slowplay a monster.
Well, middle pair with that board against a monster range isn’t doing very well. When she shoves, it’s ballpark 2-1 odds for Phil to call. He therefore needs ~34% equity to call, which admittedly isn’t that much. Probably needs a little bit more than that though, taking into account ICM. Even with middle pair, it’s not that easy for me to construct a reasonable range for Shak where Hellmuth’s getting much greater than 34% equity. A big ace that wiffed and is now trying to scare Phil out of the pot, like AK or AJ, or heck, even AT, seems likely, but most of those would have shoved over him pre. Did he put her on some bluff with a SC, never mind how shallow the effective stacks were, or some pretty broadway hand like AJ or KJ? KJ actually makes some sense, now that I think about it: hard for most players to shove over pf, flopped an OESD, and now the player wants to see 5 and realize their equity. Phil’s ahead of KJ and easily has the odds to call. Other than that, it’s hard for me to understand otherwise why he called.
I do normally agree that with TP/GK, you let a player as aggressive as Phil bluff on that dry of a board. It could be that with the stop and go, she was trying to level him into a call, by making herself appear that she didn’t want to face any more action.
The universal disclaimer for looking at situations like this is that we’ve no idea what the dynamic was like between them during this FT, even with the hand updates. So, what makes no sense in a vacuum might make perfect sense here, depending on what level of thinking each of them were on.
Apologies for the wall o’ text.
Isn’t it good strategy to be unpredictable?