The Poker Brat Lashes Out At Critics And Claims He Is The Poker GOAT 

Over the years, Phil Hellmuth has been the subject of continuing attacks and insults from fellow pros, especially the younger generation of players. A lot of them are offended with Hellmuth’s “Poker Brat” personality at the table and is one of the reasons why Hellmuth has struggled to gain the respect he deserves for his poker skills. 
Hellmuth’s poker career, which spans over three decades, has been marked with huge successes. The Poker Brat has won a record 15 World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelets and is also a Poker Hall of Fame inductee. His total live tournament earnings currently sit at nearly $25 million, putting him in the Hendon Mob’s list of the top 20 players on the All-Time Money List.  
The 57-year-old has repeatedly claimed he is the greatest of all time, but a lot of poker pros disagree, with some saying he is no match to the present generation of successful players. Others also call him out on his high roller performance, which is not very impressive. 
Hellmuth Hits Back at Critics
In a recent interview on Doug Polk’s YouTube podcast, Hellmuth fired back at his critics, saying they simply don’t understand his game that’s the main reason why they continue to attack him.
Hellmuth hasn’t won a major title over the past few years but has continued to cash in multiple tournaments. He’s also creating some noise right now for winning all of his matches on PokerGO’s heads-up show High Stakes Duel. 
During the premiere episode, he won three straight sessions against Antonio Esfandiari. He also outclassed Daniel Negreanu in all of their three matches, and more recently, he defeated sports broadcaster, Nick Wright.
But his latest results are still not enough to convince everyone that he’s the GOAT, and Hellmuth offered some sort of an explanation why doubters still exist. He told Polk some people just don’t get his game style. 
Most players today are employing a GTO-based strategy. But Hellmuth has chosen a different route. He doesn’t like to adjust his play style to fit the modern GTO approach. Hellmuth usually sticks to his aggressive strategy regardless of the type of opponent he’s up against. Because of this, a lot of players think his skills are less than impressive. Additionally, the 1989 WSOP Main Event champion’s results in high roller tournaments aren’t that great, compared to the younger pros. 
Hellmuth has continued to attract critics by putting out some misleading figures. For instance, he said that he earned around $1.8 million playing high roller tournaments. This claim was disputed by Doug Polk since most of that money came from his final table finish in the $1,000,000 buy-in WSOP Big One for One Drop in 2012, during which he won his best live cash to date of $2,645,333.
This means the 15-time WSOP bracelet winner’s other high-roller results have been break-even, indicating that he won a lot of money from the other high-stakes tournaments that he participated in. 
Hellmuth brushed aside the criticism and said he is at all not impressed with younger pros who are disrespectful to him. He told Polk he encountered some of these young players at a recent high roller tournament and used a lot of swear words to describe them!
Hellmuth was honest and acknowledged he isn’t the best tournament player in the world today but firmly believes he is the greatest poker player of all time.  
Hellmuth vs. Tom Dwan (Aug. 25)
The Poker Brat has an ongoing prop bet with Daniel Negreanu. One of the conditions of the bet is that he should make a profit across 50 high roller tournaments at the Aria where the buy-in is a minimum of $25,000. If he succeeds, Hellmuth gets $400,000 from Negreanu; if the results are the other way around, he will have to pay the Canadian poker pro $200,000.
Hellmuth is also currently preparing for his upcoming match with Tom Dwan on High Stakes Duel which is scheduled to kick off on August 25. It will be another epic heads-up battle between two legends that poker fans around the world will be keen to follow.