Ultimate Bet WTF? (Hellmuth has worse hand, but pot gets shipped to him anyway)

Big f'n YIKES.

I know this is a decade old thread; but that reaction screams 'in on it'.

That stuff DOESN'T happen online; because the software shouldn't be able to misread a winning hand....Live it can happen; online, the rules are written in code; that shouldn't change.

Just...wow. I don't understand.

It happened on Cake poker also.

I never understood how Phil Hellmuth was the public face and poster boy for Ultimate Bet and side stepped any backlash, scrutiny or real negating outing for any role in them stealing over 40 million from the players. Publicly he dosen't play big cash games and when he does he buys super short and dosen't win. He dosen't play in the super high roller tournaments that I know and if he does he isn't cashing. I'm sure he has sound investments over the years and all that but has it not occurred to anyone else that he's been sitting on a nice chunk of all that grifted money from UB/AB for all these years peeling off just enough to play the series every year? Just a thought...

Some loose thoughts here...

a) I'd argue he DID get some backlash, although I agree not as much as he should have. Plenty of people – myself included – root against him if for no other reason that he put his name behind UB and continued to champion the company even though the wake of Black Friday.

Here's one example:

b) The leaked back-room recordings suggest Hellmuth was deliberately kept out of the loop when it came to the actual superusing. So when it comes to cheating, it's far more reasonable to assume that Phil never did it himself nor even knew it was going on. Contrast that to Annie Duke, whom the recordings indicate did get to use the cheating software (which also shows she knew about its existence). If/when people confronted Hellmuth about the NioNio accusations, he turned to the Greg Piersons, Jim Ryans and Jon Karls of the world – people he trusted – and they ensured him, nope, nothing to see here.

c) Contrition goes a long way sometimes: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showp...

No, it doesn't erase all sins but we've seen in situations ranging from major scandals and to that time your kids spilled paint in the garage that 'fessing up to wrongdoing will always go over better than lying about it, doubling down, and then getting caught. It's why we see Alex Rodriguez on the Fox Sports broadcast team but not Lance Armstrong on the Tour de France telecasts.

d) Hellmuth's appeal reaches the casual fan more than the diehards.

This might be the main reason why Hellmuth's reputation remains quite untarnished, at least when it comes to his association with UB. We're talking the inside operations of online poker. That alone trims out a huge swath of the game's fandom. ElevenGrover could put out a second UB documentary specifically centered around Hellmuth, and plenty of 2+2ers would give a stinkeye any time his Bratness is mentioned on PokerGo. But go into the comments section of any poker video on YouTube. You can immediately see how few poker fans get into the weeds of this industry vs. how many just follow the game on the televised surface.

There's a few that did this. The likes of Maria Ho promoted UB long after they were known to be cheaters and withholding the hand historys etc.

The only one I give a pass to that did that is Prahlad. He was the person that lost the most to the cheaters so tbh he probably saw it as his only way to get his money back.

For sure. Joe Sebok was probably an even bigger example.

Still, I put Hellmuth in his own category altogether because he was there from start to finish. But even more, after Black Friday came and went, he continued to lean into the idea of UB being an honest company despite the avalanche of information that came out in 2011. This is why I emphasized the word "and" in my previous post. Hellmuth was next level when it came to his support for UB and his boys.

Helmuth is a whore with zero ethics who despite all of his wealth will put his name on anything.

Bitcoin Latinum lmao

The role of him and Annie Duke should continue to bring shame upon themselves.

Sometimes, Annie obtains attention in legitimate and intellectually rigorous channels, and I think it would be helpful for more people to contact those outlets and inform them of her history.

He continued to support Greg Pierson long after it was clear Pierson was at best completely incompetent and at worst absolutely corrupt. In fact, he's still referring to him as an old friend as recently as 2021

https://twitter.com/phil_hellmuth/status...

That's an "oh FFS" for me, dawg.