Phil Hellmuth: The Life of a Poker Megalord
It’s hard work being a walking brand. Between juggling Wall Street-sized business deals, leading the movie star lifestyle, and finding time for the occasional poker tournament, Phil Hellmuth has his work cut out for him. Here’s the man himself on life at the top.
Phil, talk us through an average day in your life (if there is such a thing).
Well, maybe I’ll get up at noon, and oftentimes I’ll be on the phone for an hour doing interviews or business stuff. Every second or third day I’ll have a workout scheduled from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Then I’ll grab some food and go pick up my kids. After I bring the kids home, I’m working again –writing articles, writing some part of a book, then talking about all the various deals I have going on. Today I got up at 12:40, met you guys, and after I’ve finished with you, I have to go get my coffee.
How do you do it all? You must be on a super high energy diet…
These days, whether I’m playing a tournament or doing whatever, I’m always on the damn cell phone, so I’ll go to Starbucks and get a white chocolate Mocha, medium size – Grande they call it – and about 30% of the time it’s non-fat, no whip, and about 75% of the time it’s regular with whipped cream. A lot of times, I’ll just grab a low-fat piece of blueberry coffee cake right there. There are times in my life, like when I’m writing a book, I’ll just get up at 10 a.m. and start doing business and, all of a sudden, four or five hours will pass; I realize I’m starving and I haven’t had any coffee yet. You just get caught up in all the stuff you have to finish. Having said that, when the poker tournament comes along, I’ll have absolutely nothing scheduled during that week.
You live in Palo Alto. Why here and not Las Vegas?
It’s interesting; out of the top 20 poker players in the world, I’m the only player who lives outside Las Vegas or Los Angeles. Most of them live in Vegas, but there’s still a bunch of them in LA. Why here? Well, I’m trying to put my family first, and I know if I were in Vegas, I’d be playing high stakes cash games all the time. I just think I get better family time up here. Once every couple of years I suggest to my wife that we move to Vegas, but she freaks out. She’s a doctor at Stanford, and she likes the roots that she’s put down in the last ten years. Me, being a poker player and spending one third of my time on the road, I haven’t developed roots in the same way. I could live in Vegas; that would be fine. But my kids have spent their whole lives up here.
Do you think it hurts your game?
Probably. I’m not exactly sure; I mean, I’ve never lived in Vegas and I’ve won nine world championships. I think what hurts my game more is the attention I’m giving to everything in my life. For example, there were five major tournaments in January; I played in none of them. I was really looking forward to the Doyle Brunson 15K, because I got close last year.
But I think my game is on. I finished third in the Tournament of Champions, and that was, like, four months ago. I haven’t really played since then, other than the Monte Carlo trip. So I’m not giving myself a chance to win right now.
It sounds like your businesses are going really well. Do you make more money from poker or from selling sunglasses?
A lot more money from business. See, in poker, if you have your focus on side games and tournaments, a million a year is a decent amount, two million is pretty good; there are a lot of people doing that. Let’s just say I used to do that. But I think in business, five to six years from now, I may be worth a couple of hundred million dollars.
What are you investing in?
I’ve been very lucky. Take my cell phone deal. They came to me with a cell phone game in May of ’04 and I said, “Yeah, I’m interested but I need a million shares in stock. Listen, I’m the most expensive poker player in the world; there are a lot of other guys out there that’ll do something cheaper than me and I’m going to want equity. I’m not just going to want a deal – I want a piece of the thing.” They came back to me and we closed the deal, and now they’ve had 500,000 downloads of my cell phone game. It’s kind of growing internationally, and now we’re starting to get some competition – the WPT now has a cell phone game and WSOP, I think, has one coming.
Look at Sports Illustrated America and see what these athletes are making. Number 100 was still making about 13 million a year and I’m getting more TV time than a lot of those sports stars. On ESPN, which carries the four major sports in America, a recent survey showed that poker has moved up to the third largest sport in the world on TV. What you have is a situation in which, as the stars of poker, our salaries are going to keep going up and up and up and, eventually, you can cross borders, which I’ve been able to successfully do. I mean, I’ve written a best-selling book. There are other borders I want to cross, too; like I’m working on a book on how to achieve great things in life. This sets me apart as a motivational speaker type of guy.
Now, I already make $50K a day for appearances, so I’m not entering the motivational game to do speeches. I might do a couple a year, but it’s just something I feel I could give back, to help other people . I mean, I’ve climbed to the top of the poker world, I’ve written a best-selling book, I’ve done a few other things that are pretty cool, and there are a few little secrets I have that help me do all this stuff.
Where did you come from to get to these great heights? What’s the foundation?
Well, I have a solid foundation from my family. My mother and father raised me in a very high moral and ethical way. So you’ll find, around the poker world, that I’ve had perfect morals and perfect ethics for 20 years. Not a lot of guys have a perfect reputation in poker – trust me. And poker players have long memories.
But your reputation, generally, is one of being very excitable and sort of outlandish…
If you think that’s all there is to it, you haven’t asked all my peers about me.
Tell me more about the ethics part…
Well, I really shouldn’t be talking to you about this; you should be asking around. If you do ask around, you’ll find that Phil Hellmuth has had perfect morals and perfect ethics through 20 years of playing poker. When the chips were down, I never cheated, I never did anything wrong – I always did far and away the right thing. People have trusted me. If I ask a high-level player to give me $200K, he won’t even think twice. There are only a handful of people in the world who could say that. My morals and ethics are impeccable and I’m proud of that – maybe that’s getting lost in the shuffle if you haven’t heard about my reputation in that area… I thought it was common knowledge.
What’s the best thing about being a celebrity?
(Laughs) Well, you have to take the good with the bad. I understand why celebrities are skittish and freak out easily, because everywhere you go people are staring at you – it’s just weird. I’m tall and always have my hat and sunglasses on, and they’ve been putting me on ESPN every single day for years. So now wherever I go, everybody’s watching me take every single step. I know what it’s like because I saw a movie star the other day in Seattle, and found myself looking at him a little bit – it’s kind of awkward.
So, the bad part is that if I haven’t been getting enough sleep and I’m feeling a little bit tired, a little bit paranoid, and people are just staring at me, it’s weird; but you develop strategies to deal with that. The worst thing is that you’re always on – any little thing you do at an airport somewhere is reported – “Phil did this.” If I’m ever in a bad mood, and I rarely ever am, I don’t give anyone outside of poker a chance to ever say anything negative about me. But there are times when I catch myself getting upset over something, and I just catch it right away. That’s because I’ve realized that if I get upset at this driver because he’s gone the wrong direction for 40 minutes, he’s going to tell everybody what an ass I am. I try to let the little stuff roll off my back. I think to myself, “You’re blessed on so many levels that you can just let it go.”
One of the nice things is going to clubs. I’m not a huge drinker, but I like to go out, and the best nightclubs in the world are in Vegas. Bouncers seem to be the biggest poker fans in the world; the minute that I show up, the bouncer sees me and whisks me through the line. All of a sudden, I’m talking to the manager and I have a VIP booth, but believe me, we celebrities pay for it. I like going to Tao in Vegas. I have the manager’s number on my speed dial. I’ll call him up and he’ll say, “What time you going to be here?” and he’ll come down to greet me. There’s a line a mile long. Bam! We go right through. Bam! There’s a VIP booth waiting for us. Bam! We’re drinking some Dom Perignon – that’s kind of nice.
I’m not afraid to dance with beautiful women; I’m not afraid to be out there having fun. When you’re a celebrity, all of a sudden there are always four beautiful women around at every nightclub you’re at. I can’t do anything, but I can at least flirt and enjoy. So that’s kind of fun!
Sometimes, it’s kind of cool to be famous. For instance, I met Michael Jordan in the VIP section at the Kentucky Derby, and he knew my name. The woman from the charity at the Derby kept bringing up celebrities who wanted to meet me, which was cool. I did ask to meet Michael Jordan; I said, “If he knows who I am, I’d like to meet him.” And she said, “Oh, he knows you.”
In 2002, when Ben Affleck was the hottest actor in the world and I went over to welcome him to a WPT Tournament, I said, “Ben, welcome.” He said, “Phil! How you doing? I’ve read your book. What kind of animal do you think I am?” I was like, “Whoa! These are the biggest stars in the world, they know my name, and they’ve even read my book!”
Is there a protocol among you celebrities where you can go up to each other and say hi when normal people can’t?
There are no written rules about it, but it does seem like you can be a little more aggressive when you’re a celebrity. Maybe it’s because thousands of people come up to me every single year and they want to meet me and shake my hand. So I’m not that hesitant when I want to meet someone else; I’m like, “Shit! I’ve just said hi to 1,000 people this year; I’ve earned the right to say hi to one of these guys.” We were in Vail and Roger Clemens was up there. We walked in to this little restaurant on New Year’s, and these kids were looking at me. We’re sitting at the bar waiting for our table, and Roger Clemens comes walking over, and he’s like, “I heard THE MAN is at the bar! Phil, I’m Roger Clemens and my sons are all huge fans of yours!” I’m like, “I know who you are, dude!”
You’re a pretty generous guy. Have you identified the people that helped get you to where you are?
I think that I’m lucky in life, and you’ll find that I’ve done at least six nights of charity work each year since 1997 and raised a lot of money. I used to give a charity night to my kids’ grammar school. My event would raise 10% of all their donations that year and it felt good to me. Yeah, I like to give things back, and I feel I’m very generous with my family and I’ve helped a lot of people out. You know, these are the things that make me strong; these are the things that make me powerful.
I mean, people who don’t have ethics and morals or generosity, what do they do with their money? Who are they helping and what’s going on with them? I’ve helped all my brothers and sisters pay for college and law school because I realized at an early age what’s the good of having all this money? What am I going to do, just stockpile it?
At minimum, I chose to go for charities and my family. I feel good. You have to understand the connection between doing great things in life and being an honest, honourable, and charitable person. It makes me stronger. The fact that I haven’t cheated on my wife in 17 years has been well-documented. And that makes me strong; that makes me powerful.
And that means I have a base at home here with my wife and children; I don’t have to lie, I don’t have to B.S., I don’t have to do any of that stuff. I come home and I get 100% pure support. I think if you’re 40-years-old, or 41 like I am, and you’ve written best-selling books and won tons of poker championships, and accomplished a lot in life, becoming very famous and well-known worldwide; if that happens to you, in general, people tend to implode a little bit. It’s a normal natural thing – look at all the athletes in America and in Europe that have made a ton of money, but at the end of their careers, they don’t seem to have any money left.
I think the reason I’ve been able to hold on to money and accumulate it in such great amounts has a lot to do with entitlement. If you don’t feel like you deserve the money, then you’ll find a way to lose it. And although I’ve been blessed with many great gifts in life, and I’m still not sure that I deserve everything, at least I can look back and say, “Man, when it comes to the way I’ve conducted myself in this world, there’s nobody out there that can say much negative about me.” Now, having said that, we can segue to what you seem to want, and that’s the Poker Brat side. Yes, I do go crazy at the tables.
How many bracelets do you think you’re going win this year?
I just don’t know. My confidence was shattered quite a bit in ’05 at the Series. Let’s look at the facts. Over my career, I have won more Hold’em tournaments than anyone in history. No one has my record in Hold’em. But still my confidence is not high. I have not won a World Championship since ’03 when I won two of them, and kind of had a chance to win the Main Event. I was really proud of my play. I was down there all the time in ’03. When ’05 rolled around, I figured it was an odd year and I’d do well. I didn’t do well, and so my confidence is a little bit shattered, and that’s a very dangerous state for me to be in… although, it’s a very healthy state for me to be in because that’s when I really focus on poker. I constantly think, is this play good, is that play good? When you walk around thinking you’re the best all the time, you don’t improve.
There are times when I just blow everyone away for two or three months or a year. I used to do that all the time. And I would walk around thinking how great I was, and how no one can beat me. I wouldn’t say it, but I felt really confident. And when you feel confident, you’re overlooking things; you’re not giving people credit, and you’re making mistakes. Everyone thinks you need confidence to win. But when you get to the point where you get as much press as I do, that’s not true. All I have to do is pick up another newspaper or watch another TV show that tells me how great I am and what I’ve accomplished. And you know what? That doesn’t help me. What does help me is not feeling good about my game. And I honestly don’t feel very confident right now. I don’t feel like… I’m not going to say I’m not going to win anything at the World Series, but I’m not going to say I am going to win something. I’m just trying to get to the next tournament to see how I do. I want to play poker because I think that I’m in the groove, but I can’t seem to get to a poker tournament.
Let’s take the A-Rod charity event I’m doing. You know what else happens on Sunday? I’m scheduled to do a poker tournament at Sundance, and guess who gets to emcee it? Me! So I get to emcee all of the sports stars on Saturday night and I get to emcee all the movie stars on Sunday night. And you cannot believe all the celebrities that are going to be at this tournament. It’s scary. They’re getting tons of A-listers… Michael Jordan is supposed to be there. So that’s a fun weekend. But what does it cost? It cost me a shot at Tunica. Tunica is a tournament that I love. I go down there; I stay in Memphis at the Peabody Hotel. That tournament has history. It’s a tournament I want to win. So I have a choice. I can do A-Rod’s charity event and this other thing, or I can play in Tunica. Yes, I wanted to play, but could I resist doing a commercial with Mike Ditka and Ron Jaworski? I couldn’t resist it. But I am going to get a chance to play some poker tournaments soon, and I’m looking forward to that. But I mean, who can fault the rock star life? Hanging out with athletes…it’s gonna be fun.
