Is Phil Hellmuth a dying brand in poker?

Whether people liked to root for or against the self-proclaimed “Poker Brat”, at the very least Phil Hellmuth’s fans and detractors could agree no one thing: Phil was a terrific poker player. Now it seems that Phil’s detractors have a lot more firepower to use against the 11-time WSOP Bracelet winner than his hubris, and ridiculous whining fits at the poker tables; the man who claims to be the greatest No Limit Holdem in the world is now having his poker kills widely questioned.

In order to understand the shift you have to look no further than poker before 2006. Prior to Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP win in 2003 the poker world was a very different place than it is now -casinos were not adding or expanding to their poker rooms; they were eliminating them in favor of slot machines! A stroll through a card-room at 6AM was like a stroll through a ghost-town, with maybe five active tables to look at.

During this period the players were not just bad, they were completely ignorant of the game. It was not uncommon to find a player capping the Turn and River with A8 offsuit on a 4-suited 2345 board -Hey, I have a Straight! So, to be a winner at the poker tables -in all but the highest of stakes-all you needed to do was play a tight aggressive poker game; that was it! And this is the climate that Phil Hellmuth thrived in.

From 2003 through 2006 things changed in that a huge number of people took up the game, both live and online, and many of these people were playing poker more frequently. Additionally, a ton of content on the basics of the game became available as people cashed in on the poker boom by writing books, and online poker portals sprang up with basic strategy articles.

These changes didn’t affect the really good poker players, because the information being devoured was basically turning people into the most vanilla poker players you can imagine, and we all know ABC are the easiest to take advantage of. Phil Hellmuth also thrived in this poker environment.

After UIGEA legislation passed in 2006 things took a dramatic turn in poker. No longer were droves of fresh players showing up at the tables armed with a starting hand chart; thanks to the UIGEA most casual players from the US stopped playing online poker -they can still be found in Brick & Mortar Casinos however-for two reasons: First, the issue of legality was brought into play, and secondly it was a hassle to deposit at poker sites, and even more of a hassle to withdraw.

So when the food source dried up the winning poker players started to cannibalize their own as the better players started developing strategies to exploit players they would previously see as hard targets. This brought about an entirely new way of thinking about the game and this is where Phil Hellmuth -and many other pre-Internet professionals-were left behind.

At first it was fairly hush-hush, but now that the new poker superstars are all online prodigies players no longer look to emulate the Phil Hellmuths of the world; everyone wants to be ‘durrrr’, ‘ElkY’, or Patrik Antonius. It has gotten to the point where Hellmuth’s antics are no longer the joke, it’s his playing style, and unwillingness to alter his thinking about the game that have become the joke -with players openly laughing at him.

A perfect example of this occurred on the PokerStars.net Big Game when Daniel Negreanu -who has worked with the young Internet pros to improve his game-tried to talk bet-sizing with Phil Hellmuth, who brushed it off as unimportant at which point the rest of the table openly snickered.