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Phil Hellmuth may be the most decorated WSOP Player in history, but is he the best player ever?

It’s an argument that has some teeth to it, and you can make a case.  This year’s World Series of Poker saw The Poker Brat make 3 final tables, and pit himself heads-up for career WSOP Bracelet Number 12 all three times.  However, in every case he fell just one spot short and failed to extend his record of the most bracelets in WSOP history.  Despite the lack of titles this year, Phil Hellmuth saw the most profitable World Series of Poker of his career in 2011 with the Main Event still pending, a truly remarkable feat considering all of his prior accolades. His incredible play at this World Series has made him the front runner for Player of the Year honors.  But do the achievements of 2011 combined with the list of unprecedented accomplishments from years past make perhaps the most recognizable player in the game of poker, the greatest player ever?  Now that is a question worth talking about. Read more…

Blow ups aside, Hellmuth is playing great this WSOP and has a 2nd chance this series at bracelet number 12, with just 18 left in the $10k Stud-8 Event.

I have to say that I’m impressed that yesterday saw three different events award bracelets.  I expected more than one of the events to be impacted by the hard stop, but the players played more loosely than I gave them credit for and we finished out the tournaments that were scheduled to be done.  So with that, there will only be 4 tournaments in action today, which marks the smallest number of tourney’s in action at the Rio since…well… I think day 1.  That should make it easy to view all the action in place, what with, you know, only having to be 4 places at once instead of 6.

Firstly I have to get the congratulatory paragraphs out to the newest jewelry recipients from yesterday. Read more…

United States Attorney General Eric Holder (pictured) said today that there is skill involved in poker. Enough skill to be considered a "Skill game?"

Today US Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at a House Judiciary Committee meeting and was asked some questions about the Southern District of New York’s indictment of the three largest US friendly online poker sites.  The part that struck me, I think that Holder really at his core is going to see that poker is a skill game.

While Holder said that he “agreed” that the actions made sense, he wasn’t exactly a great sales person for the prosecution.  Firstly, Holder said at the committee meeting today that “We have to enforce the law as it exists and there are laws on the books with regard to Internet gambling that we have to enforce.  The case that we brought for instance in the Southern District of New York involved pretty substantial amounts of money and big financial institutions and I think those cases are appropriate.”

I’m reading a little between the lines here, but my basic thought on this quote is that the only reason that they brought the action is because these companies made so much money.  While I think that he believes the UIGEA violations occurred by the sites, I don’t think that action would have been taken if the companies were only making a few thousand bucks a year.  But because that number was around $40 Billion, well, now you have our attention. Read more…

Johnny Chan made us all think that he could do it again at this year's WSOP Main Event

There are very few names in the poker industry that are referred to with the same sense of awe as Johnny Chan.  For nearly 30 years, Chan has been throwing cards around poker tables all over the globe, and stacking the chips of other poker players that have left with their wallets empty because they played with the poker icon.  Bob Stupak once coined the nickname “The Orient Express” after Chan won the 1981 American Cup poker tournament, getting through the final table of the tournament in under an hour.  The name just stuck and the train has been cruising along the tracks ever since.  Chan was the last player to win back to back WSOP Main Event titles (in 1987 and 1988), a feat which is very likely never going to be replicated given the size of today’s fields.   It’s also incredible that in 1989, he finished runner up in the Main Event to Phil Hellmuth.  But the 10 time bracelet winner was immortalized in the movie “Rounders” where Mike McDermott watched the tape of Chan slow play a monster versus Erik Seidel en route to winning his second Main Event title.

Last year I had Andew Feldman of ESPN on our show (the TPT Live Show) to talk about the play at the final table after the November 9.  As part of our discussion, we discussed if there was another player that would have the impact on the game of poker that Phil Ivey had in making the November 9.  I somewhat  jokingly said “Can you imagine if Johnny Chan was a November Niner? In fact, I think that Johnny Chan will make the final table again.”  This year, he made me believe that it was not only possible, but likely.  This made his 2010 Main Event story one of the best of the year. Read more…