Ok, so next year, then
Three months ago, 17-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth said he was not going to play in the 2025 WSOP Main Event. But this week, he seems to have had a change of heart, as he has announced he will, in fact, participate in the most famous poker tournament in the world.
On Monday, Hellmuth posted a video to social media saying that he is willing to play in the 2025 WSOP Main Event if his fans want him to. And to that end, he put up a poll, allowing the public to vote, the results of which he said he would abide by. It should come as no surprise – to Hellmuth or anyone else – that the public voted overwhelmingly in favor of him playing.
In exchange for changing his mind about the Main Event, Hellmuth said that he will boycott next year’s tournament if WSOP organizers do not adjust the schedule to make it more manageable. Specifically, he wants what would be Day 6 to be an off day to allow players to rest during the middle of the extended tournament grind.
It was inevitable
Oddly, except for a screenshot Hellmuth posted Thursday, the poll seems to have disappeared. Though he did not personally post any “official” decision until yesterday, Hellmuth certainly played up the “drama” on his X account for a couple of days.
He shared videos and posts of fellow poker players urging him to compete and on Tuesday, shared a Poker.org video of him arriving at the $25,000 WSOP fantasy draft in full vlogger mode, confirming to Daniel Negreanu, who was also vlogging, that he is going to play in the Main Event.
Hellmuth followed that up yesterday with an affirmative reply to someone hoping for one of his classic big Main Event entrances and then, just this morning, he finally posted that he is “100% playing” in the tournament.
It appears that this was probably the plan all along, as he said he even has his “Highway to Hellmuth” entrance all planned out, along with a Ford Mustang giveaway by BetRivers, for which he is an ambassador.
Road fraught with peril
Phil Hellmuth originally announced that he was going to sit out the 2025 WSOP Main Event this past February, saying that it was just too much of an endurance test, even to squeak into the money.
“It’s just too tough, just too tough,” Hellmuth explained in a video. “People are like, ‘Oh Phil, you can play seven days in a row!’ Yeah? Try it. Try getting up and playing at noon until midnight seven days in a row and then they’re, ‘Ohhh, well, today we have to play to 2 or 3 in the morning,’ which also happens at the WSOP Main Event.”
He added that the tournament’s length, both in terms of days and hours per day, disproportionately hurts older players (Hellmuth himself will turn 61 on the final day of the Main Event) and that some have told him that they “blew” the Main Event because they wore out.
Image credit: PokerGO.com
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