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Professional poker player Phil Hellmuth says that he got out of a slump eight years ago when he changed his email address. His luck turned, he explains, when he switched from the aspirational email moniker “tryingtobethegreatest” to the more self-assured “beingthegreatest.” “I just wasn’t winning anything,” but then “I just started smashing,” he says. “I’m a big believer in the power of your own words.”
Over the course of his career, Mr. Hellmuth has won a record 14 World Series of Poker championships and more than $21 million in prize money from live tournaments (as opposed to online gambling). His earnings from those tournaments currently place him in the all-time top 10 of professional poker players.
Last month, he released a new autobiography, “Poker Brat”—which is his nickname because of his many animated temper tantrums in nationally televised tournaments. When he loses, the 6-foot-6 player sometimes spirals into profanity-laced tirades, berating dealers, his opponents or himself. He threw a fit recently when he was eliminated on the second day of the main event at this year’s World Series of Poker.
Now 53, Mr. Hellmuth grew up in Madison, Wis., where his father was a college dean and his mother a sculptor. He got bad grades in high school and preferred playing games such as Scrabble, Monopoly and poker with his grandmother to studying. While a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he started playing cards with local doctors and lawyers for money.
After three years of college, he told his father that he wanted to drop out and play poker professionally. His father, who has a Ph.D., a J.D. and an M.B.A., didn’t react well. “There’s no such thing as being a professional poker player,” he told his son. “That’s like being a drug dealer.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Hellmuth dropped out in 1985 and started playing in bigger games in Las Vegas. He found that he could make $10,000 in a single night and was able to support himself with his poker winnings. Four years later, at age 24, he became the youngest person to win the World Series of Poker’s main event. After that tournament, his father came around to his profession, and Mr. Hellmuth bought him a new Mercedes with his winnings. His parents now go to Las Vegas to watch him in at least one World Series of Poker event each year, Mr. Hellmuth says.
Much of his talent, he says, comes from his ability to detect patterns of behavior and read people. He often plays private, high-stakes poker games on the side. Sponsors have helped to fund him in some tournaments, but he says he’s paid his own way for most of the 30-some years he’s played in the World Series of Poker. The fees add up: Players must buy into each event (a seat at the main event, Texas Hold’em, costs $10,000) and cover travel and living expenses during the series, which can last up to two months.
Mr. Hellmuth says that he is always thinking about the reasons behind a mistake so that he can avoid making a similar one the next time. “Did I drink too much that night? Did I do this? Did I do that?” he says. “There are rules and lines and limits, and you struggle to negotiate and figure that out.”
The stress of making big errors, as well as the ups and downs of making an income from tournaments, can dramatically affect poker players, he says. Some get depressed, while others have panic attacks. Mr. Hellmuth says that he has a panic attack roughly every four years. It’s been three years since his last one.
Mr. Hellmuth and his wife, a doctor, have two grown sons and live in Palo Alto, Calif. When he’s not playing poker, Mr. Hellmuth likes playing golf and watching basketball games. He’s a big fan of the Golden State Warriors. He plays poker with some of the team members, though he won’t reveal which ones.
His day-to-day schedule is unpredictable. He spends about half of his time traveling to poker games and to appearances at events, where he may be paid $50,000 a night. He generally plays five or six tournaments a year outside of the World Series of Poker. He often plays late into the night and then sleeps in.
He’d like to improve his poker-brat behavior, though not everyone wants him to. Twenty years ago, when games weren’t televised as often as they are now, poker officials used to tell him to work on his temper. But when the games started attracting more viewers on television, producers told him just to be himself. “What do you mean?” Mr. Hellmuth asked. “We need you to be the poker brat,” they told him. He says his behavior isn’t a strategy to throw off his opponents; he just can’t help it.
Mr. Hellmuth accepts that people find his rants entertaining (as YouTube videos like “Top 5 Phil Hellmuth Meltdowns” attest), even though he insists that they don’t show who he really is. “That’s less than 1% of my life,” he says. He thinks he’s succeeded in becoming calmer, in part by focusing on the game in front of him rather than what happened earlier. But he knows he could do better. “I talk about how I’ve changed,” he says, “but then I still lose it.”
Phil forgot to mention the more than $20 million he received from UB and the tens of millions they got to keep by cheating players like Brad Booth.
