Self-Help the Phil Hellmuth Way on The Poker Life Podcast

‘When I’m in England and I show a little ego, then I’m a real asshole,’ says Hellmuth to Joe Ingram early on in the podcast. One immediately wonders if Phil ‘the Poker Brat’ Hellmuth has ever shown only a little ego. He’s got the Aria hat, and makes sure the audience knows he’s calling in from a room there. He also drops his affiliate link for the WSOP coverage on Poker Go – Poker Central’s platform for live casting the Main Event. He’s a natural salesman, he should be going door to door. Which is part of his appeal – the salesmanship, the spectacle, the guy we love to hate. A big personality who is not afraid to be the bad guy and who, like an actor, loves us as the audience.

With the marketing out of the way (so far as it ever is for Phil), Joe digs into what Phil’s been up to of late – he’s been the MC at Tiger Jam partying with named celebrities – and his plans for the coming year which involve writing and a pot-load of pot-limit Omaha.

It is, on the whole and against all expectation, a thoughtful interview with the Poker Brat. Which isn’t to say Phil resists the siren call of self-flattery or manages to get through more than a minute or two of the interview without dropping the names of some athlete or model he’s been VIP-ing around with. But he does also show a great deal of self-awareness in talking about his constant ego-wanking, his struggle with his temper, and the downsides of celebrity.

For example, while he can’t help mentioning that he spent time with Kate Upton he does also manage to turn that into a digression on how well she handles the threat of splitting oneself into public and private. He says how well she is dealing with it for someone so young, and how he failed to find a way to manage that split and bring himself together until he was well into his forties. 

Turning to his personal life he talks tenderly about his sister who is a special olympian and he takes a genuine pride of her achievement. Though not as much pride as he does with the fact he’s never cheated on his wife despite, he stresses, the many opportunities. The trick, he says, is going to the bathroom for a few minutes when you get to heat up and weighing up the thirty seconds of fun with the loss of his marriage. He is such a hero.

Unwavering fidelity aside, it is interesting to hear Phil talk about his 27 year long marriage, and how he manages the ‘bad boy’ persona – The Phil Hellmuth he describes as ‘living the movie with a beautiful woman on each arm’ – as compared to the Phil who goes home every night to his wife and spends an hour and a half in therapy each week formally working on their marriage. 

His wife is a child psychologist so, as many a player has taken great pleasure in pointing out, is uniquely equipped to handle his nonsense.

For those who worry the interview is a little to softball, Phil’s record with Ultimate Bet (and the contract he was due to sign a week after Black Friday with Full Tilt) is discussed and Phil faces up to the controversy without taking any responsibility on himself at all. That’s as far as it goes, Poker Life podcast is after all an entertainment.

He also finally answers the questions no one was asking: did Hellmuth invent GTO? And how exactly he measures who the best players in the world are. But the real substance of the interview relates to his next book. With the autobiography sorted and due to hit shelves and online dealers based in tax-free jurisdictions everywhere in August, he is already hard at work on the next opuscule: Positivity, which will be a self-help book he is currently doing edits on and hopes will be out around Christmas. ‘Two books in one year,’ he says proudly.

He gets a bit meta, talking about how he handles the publicity side of his life the TV games and endless interviews, drawing comparisons between wallflowers like Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey who tend to shy away from the more public aspects of poker – and suggesting that his confident approach to everything is what Positivity will be about. He has the usual modest expectations of the book: ‘It will help maybe tens of millions of people.’ It’ll even include a whole chapter on his three steps for controlling anger.

Do as he says, I guess. Not as he does.