Bryn Kenny called Phil Hellmuth a "second-tier player" and said that he can only beat weak players. Phil responded that he plays high roller tournaments, and that he makes a good profit in them.
Brin made his explosive announcement on the popular non-poker podcast Digital Social Hour.
– A lot of people label Phil Hellmuth as the tournament GOAT, but I'd love to hear your opinion because he doesn't really play in the higher stakes tournaments like you do.
– He's the biggest winning WSOP player, he has his career, which is impressive. He's played a lot of big field tournaments and has been successful in those throughout time, even winning bracelet events. But he's played some high rollers and hasn't really fared very well in them.
I think when you think about who are the best players in poker, if you're not competing at the highest level, you can't really be in contention for it. It's almost like you could be the head of some subcategory that exists somewhere else,
– Like a casual tournament.
– Yeah, like WSOP, he's number one in WSOP player, okay cool. But WSOP has huge fields. What about when you play the small fields with the best players? Then you really see how good you are at poker because year after year, if you're winning in those, then you're standing the test of time versus the people who are at the top of their game.
If you're playing against mostly amateur players who are at the World Series, you're great at beating the amateur players. It's like he could be the king of Triple-A or something, but he's not really in the majors.
– When you say tournament player, you've got to include the High Roller events.
– You could say those are lucky, small fields, but you get lots of play and you're playing versus the toughest people. There's no luck involved from year to year out. Maybe in one specific tournament..
– Yeah, but not year after year.
– So we'll give him the king of Triple-A.
– He thinks he's the GOAT of everything.
– He says that he is online. He doesn't want to play me heads-up. If he's looking to ever make a huge bet in the World Series, I'll consider playing a whole WSOP series and show him that he's not even the best at those either.
– You just don't want to commit to the big fields?
– It's just too much, especially if you make a bet like that. You're playing every day for a month and a half.. I've put so much time into poker already. I love poker, and I don't think you could really get to the top without loving what you do. But now I have a daughter that's one and a half. I want to spend time with her. I want to do other things in life, take the skills that I've learned in poker and translate it to something bigger.
Phil's response didn't take long to arrive:
– To me the WSOP (World Series of Poker) is the “big leagues.” Always has been, always will be. It’s aggravating to me when people lie about me and my legacy. For the record, I am winning over $1.5M in “High Rollers.” (Easy to confirm this on HendonMob)
You said I wouldn’t play you heads up? Where were you I challenged the entire world to a $1.6M heads up challenge on “High Stakes Duel?”
In the best traditions of old-school professionals, Bryn offered Phil to back up claims with cash :
– I’ve told PokerGo I’m ready to play from the beginning, we know you get to cherry pick who you were playing. Let me know when the offer is there to play me for $1 million, I’ll be there.
Also if you wanna showcase how good you arent, I’m happy to crossbook 100% in any Triton series
In one of the latest Solve For Why podcasts, the hosts also discussed this topic. The guest in the studio was 2012 WSOP Main Event finalist Jesse Sylvia. During the discussion, Matt Berkey inadvertently compared himself to Linus Loeliger, for which he also received a portion of hate in the comments.
Matt Berkey: What do you guys think? Did Bryn nail this one, or is he out of pocket?
Jesse Sylvia: I think he's right about a lot of it until he calls it the Triple A's. I get why he calls it that, but I think differently than him. I think it's just a different skill set almost. I don't necessarily think that many of the people who do well in the high rollers would have the same or could match Hellmuth's win rate at the World Series tournaments. I think it would take some serious adjusting by them, and he just has a very good talent for that. So I just think those things are different.
Brian Lamanna: Do you think he'd be a favorite versus Bryn if they made a bet like he suggested in the World Series?
Jesse Sylvia: I don't know. Bryn's a different animal with that kind of stuff. Bryn is impressive at figuring stuff like that out.
Brian Lamanna: But I mean, at first, I think definitely more of the "feel" player, I guess you would say, like closer to Phil.
Matt Berkey: If they include all the games, Phil's obviously a favorite. Bryn certainly doesn't play mixed games well.
Jesse Sylvia: I think he was specifically meaning large field No-Limit events when talking about it.
Matt Berkey: Yeah, but, "f*** you!" That's not fair, right? Judge the man on his entire resume. Don't just cherry-pick what suits you. That's not the way this works. It has to be apples to apples.
Brian Lamanna: If you're specifically talking No-Limit Hold'em, it's different because you have to think about poker as a whole, and there are many other games, as you know, with these mixed games.
Matt Berkey: I also think the metrics by which they made the wager would matter a lot. If it's a WSOP bracelet bet, I think Hellmuth is a slight favorite because I do think Bryn has an edge in the small field, big buy-ins that Hellmuth may not even play. But Hellmuth is going to get way more volume at the mix game level, and he's just going to be a significant favorite in those compared to Bryn playing the $500 opener or the $1K Mystery Bounty.
How they qualify the bet matters because you can't do it based off money. Like Phil winning a $1,500 Deuce to Seven for 90k is not the same as Bryn ripping off the 250k for $5 million. So that can't be the qualifier.
Jesse Sylvia: I think it would have to be like player World Series Player of the Year list or something like that because Bryn will play mixed games. I'm pretty sure he plays them.
Matt Berkey: To back up this statement, he would have to.
Going back to what you said about thinking differently than him, I very much align with you. Maybe this is a take people aren't going to like, but to me, we've been seeing this a lot over the last four or five years. It's a lot of chest-puffing or pounding the chest and bragging about playing the highest stakes in these sort of small field, turbo-type events.
Brian Lamanna: That's funny, sorry to cut you off, but Bryn acted like there's a lot of play in small fields, but there's a lot of play. So you're calling him turbo?
Matt Berkey: Yeah, but he's just wrong.
Brian Lamanna: Especially when he said – I thought about the PokerGO Studio events. I'm not exactly sure about the Triton.
Matt Berkey: Most of these high rollers are 30 or 40-minute levels. I guess there are probably some main events that may be an hour. The World Series ones are an hour, I know that.
Nevertheless, when he's talking about the high rollers being the majors and everything else being the minors, that to me is like all the online guys who were claiming that the best live players couldn't beat 500 Zoom. It's like, well, that's because there just isn't a ton of win rate in the pool. The pool is calibrated in a specific way where it just would not be worth the transition. It's not that the capabilities are not there.
I think that's kind of how I feel about the High Roller scene. It's not that I don't recognize that all of the talent is pulled there. It absolutely is – the best of the best are all playing high rollers for sure. But the notion that we have any idea who is talented based off of results over the last 5 to 10 years, in that pool, is insane because the win rate available is relatively low.
I'm using people who know way more about this stuff than me, like Ike. I think he's been on record as saying that he imagines the average edge to be somewhere in the neighborhood of like 3%, and maybe on the fringes somewhere in the neighborhood of like 8 to 10%. So if ROIs range that low among the winning players, it's very difficult to crown a winner in any capacity over a sample that's less than substantial.
I'm not exactly sure what would qualify as substantial in this instance, but it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of like 100,000 games. Maybe you start to get a glimmer of it at like 20,000 games, but no one in the High Roller scene is going to play anything close to that in their lifetime.
So what are we really talking about here?
I understand poker's always going to kind of distill down into an ego contest and a battle of who is more arrogant than the next, but there's a world where Bryn's just been sun-running the last decade, you know? It's not out of the question by any stretch, and I would think a lot of his peers – and this is not to throw shade at Bryn – but I would imagine a lot of his peers in the High Roller scene don't see him as a threat in the field.
It's just he's done a lot of goated s***, like call his shot in the million-dollar buy-in and not only win it but also cross-book himself to make the buy-in bigger than it already was, where the majority of the field is doing the opposite – they're laying off risk because the win rate is so incredibly small. Look, that stuff is what we write books about. That's the stuff movies are made of – somebody overextending themselves in an event where they need to win it now in order to become the hero, and then they just go out and do it. That's legendary s***.
But let's not dismiss Hellmuth's track record. For all of his faults, you cannot deny what this man has done.
I think another great example of this would be somebody like Altman or somebody like Darren Elias. Their track records in open fields are second to none. Do they convert all that well to small field, high buy-in, fast structure events? No, because it's a totally different skill set.
