Phil Hellmuth Bows Out of WSOP Main Event Over Lengthy Play
Phil Hellmuth says he will sit out 2025 WSOP Main Event. The poker pro feels it will be too much for him to endure.
Key Facts:
- The WSOP Main Event 10k NHL World Championship kicks off July 2nd.
- The ten-day tournament has turned into a gruesome 12-hour-a-day endurance battle.
- More than ten thousand people entered last years main event.
- More entrants mean higher prize pools, but poker pros are skeptical.
Phil Hellmuth has become the first pro player to tell the WSOP enough is enough. He won’t be competing in the WSOP tournament Main Event, the ten thousand buy-in, No-Limit Hold ’em game that drew a record 10,112 players to the Las Vegas Strip last summer.
Those record crowds spelled record payouts with $10 million for first place, $6 million for second, and $4 million for third. Even making the Final Table was worth a cool $1 million, and with that many players, even the player who came in 1008th cashed $20k.
Different Decades, Different Rules
The issue is that getting through to just the end of day 3, which is where the first cash-ins start, can take long 12-hour days with 2-hour levels. From there, you still have almost another week of grueling ten and 12-hour play to the final table. And even the final table is no quick shoot-out. In 2008, it went on for 434 hands.
There was a time not that long ago when the Final Table was postponed until November to let everyone rest up and study the other players, but now the Final Table ends with a bang less than two weeks after the first flight has started.
Phil Hellmuth, who has a record 17 WSOP bracelets but hasn’t won the WSOP Main Event since 1989, took a hard stand against the 100+ hours of total play required to get to the final table.
It’s just exhausting, and I can’t win, and I think that it really hurts the older players in a much bigger proportion than the younger players.– Phil Hellmuth, Pro Poker Player, Las Vegas Review Journal
At a spry sixty, players more than two decades older will be competing and may have the same thoughts, but Hellmuth’s theatrics and tournament wins have made him one of pokers’ most prominent stars and, thus, spokespersons.
While it has been more than 35 years since he won his last main event, he has a record 17 WSOP bracelets and perhaps even more impressive $30 million in live tournament winnings, rapidly approaching 200-lifetime WSOP event cashes. He did win the European WSOP main event 10k Euro NHL game as recently as 2012.
So when Phil tells GGpoker, the new owner of the WSOP, that maybe it is time for some breaks in between rounds, he garners a lot more attention than some poor 82-year-old dentist from Des Moines who has been attending the main event for three decades but finds he can’t do it anymore.
Many older players argue that the WSOP Main Event has evolved into an endurance contest, grinding down over 10,000 hopefuls to just nine. While this kind of play has long been associated with these higher entrant tournaments and their associated large cash prizes, it seems likely that at some point, the pure tedium of it will start to restrict new entrants, and GGPoker will step in and make changes.
But over the past few years, that has not been the case with more buy-ins and renewed interest in the crowning moment of WSOP, the 10k No-limit Hold ’em Championship, The Super Bowl of tournament poker. Until interest wanes, it’s unlikely that even Phil Hellmuth can exact much change.
And, of course, as many people rightly point out, he hasn’t made it past day three since 2015, and in most tournaments, he is out well before even that. His admonitions about a week of grueling play may be true, but they haven’t applied to him personally in quite some time, though other recent Main Event winners have echoed his sentiments.
Many aren’t convinced that the old showman, long known for his over-the-top entrances to this event, won’t be in the thick of the tournament when all is said and done. Mercurial, dramatic, and even abusive may all be terms that apply to the Poker Brat, but uncompetitive and wallflower certainly aren’t.
