Here at Melted Felt HQ we already had a lot
of respect for Phil Hellmuth. I mean, how many other poker pros could get so
much cash from corrupt poker site Ultimate Bet, then get away squeaky clean and
smelling of oh-so-beautifully scented roses?
Oh yeah,
a little *grudging* respect for accumulating 12 World Series Of Poker
bracelets too.
In fact, it is number 12 which we wanted to
focus on today… 7 card stud is a tough game with many hardened pros having 60
years of experience already – and, well, Phil took baby cards after baby card
and bluffed them out of every damn pot.
Apparently it all started with a pair of
aces in the hole and a two showing. Phil decided to raise and got a couple of
callers looking like they had small split pairs. No messing about when brick
baby cards fell on 4th and 5th, Phil just kept on firing,
one of his opponents paired 6th and Hellmuth caught the 3rd
ace – he fired, hoping for a re-raise, and *boom* his opponent laid it down.
Confused as to why someone who looked like
they improved while his board looked like a bust would fold, Phil checked out
the fortitude of a couple of the other players around. When they too sighed and
folded to his board showing baby cards, Phil decided that the $5k 7-card stud
event was full of the weakest players ever put on the earth.
He continued bluffing them, some confusion
at one showdown, where it did look like his opponent had trips to beat his
small 2-pair… must have been an unseen straight or something, right?
As they got down to the final few tables,
the guy who was labeled as the player who could not diversify out of Holdem was
on a roll. At one point he was literally raising every time he had a baby card –
representing trips in the hole. At one point Phil did comment that he had not
actually been informed about the rule change which meant that the highest card,
and not the lowest had to bring in… but everyone seemed cool with it, so he
simply put it down to not keeping up with the latest trends in poker in general
due to focus on his business interests.
Along came the money bubble and Phil
decided that, while his table continued to play this weak, he would bluff every
single time he had small cards on board.
Just before the final table he made a masterful lay-down after pairing his
King door card and facing a 4-bet re-raise, the guy must have had an open ended
straight and flush combo with those small cards – meaning he was not a favorite
by 7th street.
Even the final table seemed to be full of
the weakest 7 card stud players ever, with kings and queens mucked on 3rd
street even with nothing higher behind. With the bracelet approaching and the
$180k prize money not such a big deal – Hellmuth saw no need to switch from his
beautifully executed plan and bluffed his way to a historic 12th
bracelet.
We would like to offer our respect, and to
note that critics all over the world have been well and truly silenced.
Now, who is going to tell him that the game
was Razz?
MF
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