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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…

Melanie Weisner has a shot at a bracelet for the ladies when action resumes today at the Rio.

Hard Stops prevented any bracelets from being awarded from yesterday’s action at the Rio.  Probably the biggest story of the day was that of Tom Dwan making yet another WSOP Final Table and giving all those bracelet prop bettors of his a nice little sweat in the process.  With 6 players left in the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship, Durrrr held the chip lead after surging from the short stack earlier in the day.  But it seemed that Razz really became his undoing as he donated basically half of his chips late in the evening at that discipline, and eventually was bumped out in 6^th when Shawn caught running diamonds on 6^th and 7^th street in Stud to flush Dwan and send him to the rail.  This was Durrr’s 4^th career WSOP Final Table (most people forget that he made two of them in 2008), and his second largest WSOP score ever (he took down $134k after winning the $381k from the runner up finish last year).  It’s also his 3^rd cash at this year’s WSOP, and who knows…maybe Dwan is heating up.  Lord knows that he’s had more opportunities than anyone else at the Rio having entered into around 2,432 events already (even more impressive considering that event #40 just started).

The reality is, whenever Dwan runs deep in a tournament, he’s the story.  His tables rail was a reported 3 people deep, Read more…