Phil Hellmuth has been playing home games in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, but the billionaire friends he plays with are not making his life any easier. As Hellmuth puts it, these guys are very smart, it’s no coincidence they managed to acquire hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
Hellmuth claims to be very good friends with Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of Facebook, and he’s close with Sacramento Kings owner and tech guru Vivek Ranadivé too.
Hellmuth has been playing these home games for around 3 years now, but has actually lost a lot, which came as a surprise to him, because he has been "crushing people in Holdem all my life". He blames himself, according to the Poker Brat he got cocky after winning a few tournaments, and tried to ”bluff the billionaires"
This January the stakes of the games have increased, and Hellmuth managed to turn a nice profit, but he says he decided to play this game as a social entertainment.
In 2012, the Poker Brat took part in the $1 million buyin Big One for One Drop event, where he finished in 4th place for $2.64 million. He missed this years event which surprised a lot of people.
According to Hellmuth, he had the necessary backing, but he did a bad job, he wasn’t aggressive enough when trying to raise the buyin. He thinks it was a silly to miss the tournament and he is never going to do this mistake again. He said he might have been the first bustout, but he should have given himself the chance to win.
Hellmuth says that organizing the backing is a skill set in itself, one he wasn’t very good at, despite knowning lots of millionaires and billionaires, but he just doesn’t like asking money from people. Former basketball player Charles Barkley, Nascar driver Matt Kenseth, Vivek Ranadivé, and Wayne Gretzky’s wife were all interested in buying shares.
