Phil Hellmuth showed up at my $1500 Limit Holdem WSOP table after several hours of play, as is the usual case with him.
He was 2 to my left.
He was wearing his Golden State Warriors gear, which made me wonder at first if he had been to the game, and then flew to Vegas on a private jet or something. (It turned out he was in Vegas, and just showed up late to the event.)
Phil was uncharacteristically quiet, choosing to tune everyone out with headphones.
I didn't say anything to him. I considered needling him about UB again, but we had already been through that before (at the Main Event featured table in 2009), so I wasn't going to bother.
Then I found myself on the BB with 7s4s. Phil threw a $1000 chip in (the blinds were 250-500), and said nothing. However, he did a "thumbs up" motion in the air, as he threw the chip. The dealer announced "raise", and everyone folded to my blind.
I then asked, "What's the rule regarding that? Does a thumbs up constitute a raise?"
The dealer replied, "Well, I said raise when he did it."
"Yes, I know that," I answered. "But I want to know the rule on this. Does that make it a raise or not?"
The dealer didn't know. She called the floor.
Phil was looking really irritated. Finally, he started to berate me.
"I hope you're proud of yourself, wasting everyone's time like this," he said.
"I just want to know the rule. I seriously don't know if that's a raise, and if it's not, then it needs to be a call," I replied.
Phil shot back, "If you were in my cash game, you wouldn't last through the day doing stuff like this."
I replied, "I've been in your cash game before. And I did last through the day. Well, maybe not on UB."
The floorman came over and ruled it a call, stating that the "thumbs up" motion is meaningless.
I checked, and the board came a very favorable 5s8s2c.
I check-raised Phil, and then the beautiful Ts showed up on the turn. I bet, Phil called. A blank hit the river, I bet, Phil called. He flashed KK and was pissed.
"You're the only one at the table that would have done this," said Phil, which was an odd statement, given that he didn't know anyone there.
"How can you say that?", I asked him. "You don't know any of these people."
"I'll bet you $10k right now that all of these people wouldn't have done this. You want action? Let's bet $10k right now, and see if anyone says they'd have done this."
"You better watch out," I said. "Maybe I have a buddy at the table who will say that they would, and then I'll win your $10k."
The talk of the $10k bet died down at that point.
He then went on to threaten to take a picture of me and post it on his Twitter, "to make everyone aware of how you make moves like that."
Phil was still muttering to himself.
"25 years I've been playing. 25 years (actually more like 30). And not once have I ever seen where the thumbs up doesn't mean raise."
"Again, I just wanted to know the rule. It's the same thing as throwing out a chip and forgetting to say raise. The intention doesn't matter. The action is what matters", I said.
Phil was getting even more pissed.
"You just decided to do something unethical so you could gain a little extra edge," he lectured. "Ethical players don't do things like this."
"You really want to go there?", I shot back. "You represented a site which stole everyone's money TWICE. They kept stealing, and you still kept representing them as the face of the site."
"I was cleared in that situation, with no wrongdoing", Phil said. Who cleared him?
"You were cleared, huh? I don't see how you could be cleared when you were still promoting the site after they cheated everyone, and then they stole all the money on top of that."
Phil then told me that his book "explaining everything" is coming out tomorrow, and that I should read it.
He finished off by saying, "I've wasted enough time on this. I'm done talking about it." But then he kept muttering throughout the next half hour about the thumbs up thing. I just ignored him at that point.
Phil lost most of the rest of his stack when a guy with AQ high ran him down to make a 1-card straight, and cracked Phil's AA. He then berated that player, who just said, "I got lucky". Phil continued berating him.
He busted shortly afterwards, and got up without saying a word.
There was the potential for more fireworks near the end of the day when Justin Bonomo was moved to my table in the seat next to me, but we didn't say a word to one another.
I finished the day with 19,200 in chips, with 133/616 left in the field. Average chips is about 35k.