Analysis on Phil Hellmuth's ROI In Poker Tournaments

After busting the $100k championship event of the Poker Master's last night, Phil took to twitter and had some interesting things to say.

Cliffs: he still thinks he's the best, but he's not.

Daniel Negreanu and many other top poker players chimed in putting Phil in his place. I generally don't want to kick a man while he is getting battered from all directions, but I couldn't help myself, so I decided to drop some truth bombs.

Conclusions

I think over his career, Phil has had $22M in cashes over roughly $13M in buyins, for a 70% ROI.
Over the last 7 years (since 1/1/2011) in NL holdem events only, I estimate Phil has had $8.2M in cashes over roughly $6M in buyins for a 37% ROI. But if we ignore his one 1M buyin event which he cashed in, I think his ROI over the last 7 years is about 11.5%.

It's incredible that Phil is still profitable while being technically inferior to probably over 2000 people in NL holdem. But he is no longer among the best players in the world. He was definitely losing money playing this series of 5 events, and his ego prevents him from putting in the time to study what better players are doing.

As an example, I did the same analysis for Olivier Busquet, the former king of HU sngs and a great mtt player, and his ROI over a similar time period is somewhere between 75-120%. For the very best tournament players like Dan Colman, Fedor Holz, and other top Germans, I think having a >150% ROI is still viable.

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My name is Ryan Daut and I'd love to have you as a follower. Click here to go to my page, then click in the upper right corner if you would like to see my blogs and articles regularly.

I am a professional gambler, and my interests include poker, fantasy sports, football, basketball, MMA, health and fitness, rock climbing, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.