Phil Hellmuth Golf Betting with Pro Athletes

Phil Hellmuth, with typical modesty, says he began playing golf at 15 because he had seen successful people doing it, and naturally he expected to join them in the future. In a recent interview with Golf Digest, Phil chatted about the world of high stakes golf in which a bog standard day can lose him $1,000 a hole for nine rounds.

There is a long association between poker and golf. Hellmuth points out that for pros in Vegas, it is a good opportunity to get some sunshine, some exercise that isn’t too strenuous, and – most importantly – you never have to stop gambling.

There was even a short running TV show called High Stakes Golf Tour which was heavily populated with recognizable poker pros, including Phils: Hellmuth and Ivey.

Golf stories abound especially in the shadier olden days. Doyle Brunson tells a story of Puggy Pearson costing the golfing pair the $500,000 they were up in a doubles match, because he kicked a ball a few inches to avoid a sunspot. The body-guard of their opponent saw the cheat, and the game broke up without anyone getting paid.

Or there’s the story of Stu Ungar losing $80,000 in prop bets the day he learned to play. He never even made it to the links.

Or the time Amarillo Slim bet his poker buddies he could drive a ball a mile or further. He won by hitting it across a frozen lake.

Or the time… or the… or… They go on.

Helmuth vs. the Famous

With typical Hellmuthian braggadocio, the interview quickly becomes a collection of anecdotes, each one thick with dropped names: blackjack with Michael Jordan, who it turns out is a basic-strategy whizz; caddying for Corey Pavin; watching Wayne Gretzky make an eagle.

Or this story about losing badly against Vegas casino mogul Bill McBeath: Hellmuth found himself asking what it would cost to buy himself out of the bet, McBeath’s reply was, ‘We go to the clubhouse, have a nice, cold beer, and you pay me for all nine holes.’ Phil goes on to draw the next two holes losing a ‘mere’ $7,000.

Unable to come out bottom in his own story Phil goes on to mention that McBeath went on to give Phil a locker at Shadow Creek. A prestigious gift. Phil makes sure to point out, when asked about the locker, that two George Bushes and a Clinton are among the others to receive that honour.

Betting on Everything

Naturally, he never plays a round without there being money on the line. There are various handicapping systems in place to keep the game even and foil the occasional hustler. But whatever the rules are the one unifier in the game for Phil is action.

If you’ve ever seen players scribbling tallies on oversized sheets of paper in games like those on High Stakes Poker its because they are recording the bets they have on various combinations of cards coming up on the flop. Prop bets like that are bread and butter for the kind of people who live for action but only get dealt seven or eight hands an hour. This is Phil’s world.

Hellmuth has got himself into several fairly public prop bets. A bizarre "triathalon" he ran against Tony G in Malta as a publicity stunt. A competition made up of swimming, running and shooting hoops. Other’s of them stretch to the extreme, Huck Seed took a bet of $100,000 from Phil. The bet was that Seed couldn’t spend 24 hours in the ocean without touching the bottom. Seed bought out of that one in the end.

And some are just silly: after being knocked off the final table at the 2002 WSOP championship, Hellmuth bet his own hair that Varkonyi would not go on to win the event. Varkonyi did, and Phil found himself buying back his own hair for $10,000 at a charity auction.

Perhaps it is to everyone’s benefit that Phil has settled for golf as his source of action.

The Pressure’s Off

Hellmuth also points out what may be another enduring appeal of golf to the gambling class. Especially those, like him who came up in the game being watched constantly by the cameras. The pressure is off.

In a moment of rare self-reflection he says:

As the PokerBrat heads forward into his fifties, it sounds like he might just be growing up.