Image courtesy of PokerGO Tour
Over the past few years, Phil Hellmuth’s success at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) has often been celebrated. But a niggling voice around the fringes of the poker world has persisted: that the Poker Brat can only do it in big-field WSOP events.
In the online streets, Hellmuth can’t cut it, they say, before multiple cashes in WSOP Online events. In heads-up matches, there’s no way Big Phil is the Big Dog; the echo comes before Hellmuth goes 3-0 against his best frenemy, Daniel Negreanu, in High Stakes Duel.
And in High Rollers? Please. There’s no chance the 1989 world champion can stand the heat of competition against poker’s fiercest new burning lights.
This week alone may rebalance some of that last thought’s credibility, as the Poker Brat reinvented himself yet again, walking back into Sin City to reach not one but two of the first three final tables in major high rollers this year.
Crossing City Limits
Las Vegas in January is not the location for tourists. This isn’t World Series season. There are no checked jackets, lanyards, or cocktails shining as lit buoys might to sharks in the water.
Like a seaside town closed for the winter, only hardy souls sit at poker tables while discarded New Year decorations are blown up and down the Strip.
The PokerGO Tour Last Chance series is an opportunity for players of a certain level to qualify for one of the 40 top positions on the season-long PGT leaderboard that will qualify them for a million-dollar freeroll event. That level? Killers.
The $1M PGT Freeroll Championship field is almost locked in. The saloon doors are swinging shut this week. So when a lone gunman ready to shoot down any opposition standing in the way of him and value walks in, we look up from our shot at the bar.
The 17-time WSOP bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth is in town. And if the Poker Brat has abandoned his California mansion for Vegas in January, then you better believe he intends to prevent it from being a wasted trip.
In the burgeoning New Year, Phil Hellmuth has so many fingers in pies that you might be forgiven for confusing him with Little Jack Horner of nursery rhyme lore. Business investments are flying, Hellmuth’s Home Game went nuclear in 2025, and his exploits at the WSOP in Las Vegas were only added to by the presence of his son Philip Junior, as he told us back in November.
The former 1989 world champion, whose moment in the spotlight all those years ago is now seen as one of the most important wins ever to take place in the game, is determined to prove his worth in another challenging area of the game.
High rollers. Small fields, battle-hardened opponents, and tension you’d need a Chainsaw to make a dent in. A potential $500,000 top prize is on the line in the $1M Freeroll Championship? Entry is paramount, but for some, numbers are short.
The PGT Last Chance saloon awaited Phil Hellmuth and some of the biggest names of the game this week.
Racking Up Early Profit
In the opening event of this year’s PGT Last Chance series, Phil took part in the $10,000-entry event in No Limit Hold’em along with 108 other entries.
Only the top 16 players got paid, but Phil was among them and comfortably made the final seven that advanced to the last day.
Second in chips, Phil got off to a great start, winning the opening hand, but lost chips later on. Needing to fight back, he doubled back into contention, beating Jesse Lonis with the best hand, before calling Jonathan Little’s exact hand of king-queen in the event too, yet more evidence of his range-finding reads.
Eventually finishing fourth for $98,100 when his ace-deuce ran into the eventual winner David ‘ODB’ Baker’s pocket jacks, Hellmuth quickly left the final table. But this jump up out of his seat and hasty exit wasn’t the red-faced tilt-fuelled departure of yesteryear.
The Poker Brat is dead… but a gunslinger hunting down its prey remains. Hellmuth soon registered for the next event and another run at glory in his newly-sponsored apparel by Under Armour. Would he be bulletproof under his black and gold garb?
The Honest Day Is Long
While Hellmuth didn’t cash in Event #2, too busy final tabling the opening event, Event #3 turned out to be another profitable trip to Valuetown, population: Phil Hellmuth.
The third $10,000-entry event of the series also saw 108 entries, and once again, 16 players collected money. Among them, only poker legends. The PokerGO crusher Sam Soverel, WSOP Super High Roller winner Chris ‘Big Huni’ Hunichen. High roller experts such as Justin Saliba, David Coleman, and Sam Laskowitz. The seemingly perennial Global Poker Index world number one, Alex Foxen, and 10-time bracelet winner Erik Seidel finished eighth and seventh, respectively.
Phil Hellmuth outlasted them all.
Into his second final table in a trio of events, the Poker Brat – or maybe the reformed Poker Sheriff – was in amongst the high rollers again, chasing the $275k top prize.
Hellmuth fell short of that lofty goal, as Brandon Wilson got the better of him in a prime bluffing spot, before Sergio Aido hit a miraculous two pair, and long-time adversary Chino Rheem turned trip aces against Phil’s pair of kings on the flop.
Many players would bust and describe their bad luck. Hell, maybe the old Phil would too. Not this time. Admitting that he “messed this final table up,” Hellmuth confessed his final table sins in a self-imposed post-match post-mortem.
Despite this semi-disastrous end to his second final table of the series, Hellmuth’s return after three events is $168,300 for $30,000 in buy-ins. That’s the kind of ROI (return on investment) that high rollers dream of.
And yet he can’t play high rollers, can’t keep up, is outdated, too old, not ready for the relentless regime against today’s younger professionals?
What’s Next for the Brat?
After the PGT Last Chance series ends, this duo of final table denouements means Phil Hellmuth is likely to play a starring role in the PGT $1M Freeroll Championship, which follows. A 50-player shootout for free money in Las Vegas.
Having walked into the Last Chance saloon and come out firing, the only man to win WSOP Main Events in the U.S.A. and Europe will be among the favorites to win it. Last year, Jeremy Ausmus took home $500,000 as the last gunman standing.
The rail will swell when Phil Hellmuth is in a hand, flashbulbs waiting to pop. Whenever Phil Hellmuth wins, it is news. Whenever he loses, even more lines are drawn under this most permanent of poker institutions.
Eras come and go. A new statute drawn up, a blow-up, a big win, a bracelet, a bounty. But the gunslinger will be back, ‘later today’ in his own words about the next high roller, and next week, month, and year in the game of poker.
Phil Hellmuth’s reputation is likely to center around his love of winning gold in Las Vegas for as long as he plays, and ever after, in whispers of the man who was a brat, the gunslinger who shot down Las Vegas, then kept coming back for more.
Hellmuth cannot resist the high rollers because it might be the last arena in which he is not truly respected to the level he should be. But he’s making a stand, and he isn’t backing down. Phil Hellmuth still has plenty more bullets that high rollers in the game will need to dodge.
