A Bite of Pizza with Phil Hellmuth

6 years ago
A Bite of Pizza with Phil Hellmuth
12:41
06 Dec

The man with more WSOP bracelets than any other poker player - 14 - recently appeared on an obscure New York pizza rating internet show hosted by Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy.

Phil Hellmuth is not a New Yorker - he was born and raised in Wisconsin and currently lives in Palo Alto, California while his career, professional poker ties him to Las Vegas, Nevada. So he probably doesn't have that much emotional attachment to the city’s pizza as locals there tend to do, and probably his appearance on Barstool Sports’ show did nothing to deepen the affection either.

Host David Portnoy went for “the bottom of the range” of what New York offers in pizzas with a $0.99 a slice place named Famous Pizza on East 28th Street. According to the rules of the show, the participants take a bite of their pie and rate it on a 1 to 10 scale based on only the first mouthful of the street food. Hellmuth did so too, and gave it a rating of 4, after pointing out that he is an “optimist” and a “high grader”, which did not reflect well on the pizza. After the “Poker Brat” learned that he could also give decimals, his score went down to 3.5.

Portnoy’s verdict was even harsher. He only gave a 1.8 and went on to say point-blank that “this pizza stinks”.  Later he even admitted he almost felt embarrassed taking Hellmuth and his family to have lunch at such a subpar pizzeria, but Hellmuth assured him he was enjoying the experience on the show, if not the pizza per se.


At the very end of the episode the cameraman inquired Hellmuth about his height, so we also got to learn that the Poker Brat is exactly 6 feet and 5Âľ inches tall which is an impressive 197 in  centimeters - Google claims that Hellmuth’s height 6’7’’, however.

What Hellmuth did not mention, somewhat surprisingly, was his recently published autobiography. The book titled “Poker Brat” came out August this year, and some would think that plugging that would be the main reason for the poker champ to appear on a silly internet show like this one.

Barstool Sports is a satirical men’s lifestyle blog founded by David Portnoy in 2003. The website is fairly popular, getting millions of hits every month, but their YouTube channel has only 90 thousand subscribers and pulls in around 2.5 million views a month. The show Hellmuth was a guest on, “Pizza Review” tends to get around 15,000 views per episode, with a few exceptions that reached higher viewerships. The pizza rating series had some other illustrious guests in the past, like hip hop artist T-Pain and medical talk show host Dr. Oz.


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Marton Magyar is a Hungarian online poker player and writer who covers the latest in poker news.Read more

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