Hellmuth Does Hellmuth on "Poker After Dark"

"Again, getting angry at Phil for being a tard is like getting mad at a smurf for being blue. You don’t marry a cheeseburger and throw a fit when you find out it’s delicious." -- Iggy

Heh, heh, heh. We do love us our trainwrecks.

I started this post off with an Iggy quote because both Phil Hellmuth and Iggy have been at it again. The first episodes of NBC's new "Poker After Dark" series aired this past week, and it featured yet another Phil-being-Phil blowup. And Iggy being Iggy, he's dug up, or created on his own, links to three separate YouTube segments showing the hilarity.

Much obliged, Monsieur Li'ldwarf. Good stuff.

If you haven't seen the show or these videos clips yet, then by all means, reward yourself by clicking that link above. As usual, these words'll be here waiting.

Two points to be made here. The first is why-oh-why would Phil think that he'd be expecting some sort of ultra-strict formality in a show so clearly flung from the cuff? Each show's "poker event" is an SNG, starting with a predetermined and equal amount of chips, so all that cash you see is entirely prop money and quite likely the latest example of the old "band two $100s around some singles" trick. And there are also rumors that the players involved had already, in many instances, worked out a pre-play chop.

The second is that if Hellmuth wasn't such a camera ham, so preoccupied by his strange desire to mug for the lens, he'd have been able to recognize it for what it was. Amazing how Phil Hellmuth's incredible reading skills, which have made him $20 million --- as Hellmuth spouts for all and sundry several times during the clips --- somehow couldn't let him figure reconcile what a shuck-and-jive the show seems to be. It doesn't matter whether the show is entertaining or not, it's still made-for-TV schlock, and Phil wants to be able to manipulate the schlock for his own purposes.

Well, hell, I was laughing.

"22 years! I've been playing poker 22 years!! And this has never happened to me before!!" I think that the next time Phil's faced with an all-in situation in a major event, that all the players at the table should get up and beckon to the surrounding tables for additional quiet, and maybe, just maybe, we could get an entire hall of poker players to pause and onlook in properly respective silence while Phil puts on his awe-inspiring show. Hell, maybe if I prostrated myself and bowed before him, Hellmuth would buy me a Dom Rose bottle of my very own.

Funny stuff. I do note that Phil apologized for much of his behavior in a later post on his own site, though as the Iggy quote at the top attests, Hellmuth is simply incapable of understanding why, for so many of us, he causes unending giggles.