(Photo: WSJ.com)
It’s (almost) always a big boost for the game when the mainstream media take an interest in the big names and stories bouncing around the poker world, and this week it was 14-times WSPOP bracelet winner Phil ‘PokerBrat’ Hellmuth who made the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
The US business-focused, international daily newspaper, based in New York City, profiled Hellmuth on the back of his recently released autobiography – the eponymously-titled (if we include nicknames that is) ‘Poker Brat’ which sees Phil chart his life from tough beginnings at school to fame and multi-millionaire fortune at the poker tables.
Surprisingly, Hellmuth claims he is actually trying to change his behaviour, outbursts such as his recent bust-out of the Main Event in Vegas “less than 1% of my life,” he says, although such temper-tantrums account for a much-higher percentage of YouTube clips featuring him for sure.
“I talk about how I’ve changed,” he told the Journal, “but then I still lose it” – achieving that inner calm not always achievable when the cards go against him, and he reveals that ‘back in the day’ the TV shows which brought poker to an ever-wider audience insisted that he stick to his stroppy outbursts. “What do you mean?” Hellmuth asked the TV people. “We need you to be the poker brat,” they told him.
It’s not a strategy to put opponents on tilt, or annoy people or to show off – it’s just how he is sometimes. And how he is has made him one of the most iconic poker professionals in the history of the game, able to charge $50,000 in appearance fees.
It’s a far cry from his beginnings when he almost quit just weeks into his ‘pro career’ in Vegas, his bankroll wiped out and not even having the air fare home, his father’s description of his ‘career choice’ an undeniably unsupportive:
“There’s no such thing as being a professional poker player. That’s like being a drug dealer.”
And bizarrely, according to Hellmuth, the slump which hit him at the end of the millennium ended when he changed his e-mail address! Swapping “tryingtobethegreatest” to what the journal calls ‘the more self-assured’ “beingthegreatest”, was all it took:
“I just wasn’t winning anything,” but after the email change “I just started smashing,” he told the newspaper, adding: “I’m a big believer in the power of your own words.”
Hellmuth’s words will always carry weight in the poker community, regardless of his at-times childish behaviour, but seeing them reach a much-wider audience is confirmation that poker still has an appeal beyond those who spend their lives on the green felt.