Playing (and learning) in public

Phil Hellmuth won't learn from the teasing he got from his Q4o call, but that doesn't mean you can't.

While most of the world was making memes about Will Smith at the Oscars the poker world was still making memes about Phil Hellmuth and how he played misplayed Q4o at the US Poker Open.

There have been many memorable Phil Hellmuth moments on the small screen over the years but this might be the most infamous, worst played and most satirised hand of his career. If you haven't seen the hand please check it out here as well as some of the Twitter response. They are well worth brewing a coffee and spending 20 minutes of your day.

can someone explain to us what's going on here?

IS THIS THE POKER HAND OF THE YEAR? pic.twitter.com/rpkIP3GwgR

— PokerGO (@PokerGO) March 25, 2022

We shouldn't make fun of how people play hands in poker if we want to grow the game. It's very intimidating to have better players make fun of the way that you play especially when you're learning the ropes and/or a recreational player. However, most people don't proclaim to be the best poker player in the world so when Phil Hellmuth does it, let's be honest, it's too funny not to (plus he clearly loves the attention).

Learning in public

This is one of the drawbacks of being an elite poker player and being invited to high stakes televised poker tournaments. Most of us have the luxury of making a mistake without an audience being there, in fact most of us are fortunate enough to be completely anonymous when we botch our hands. If you want all the benefits that come from being a well known poker player you have to take some of the negatives, and that includes people on social media criticising the way you play.

Poker has a long history of infamous hands where people played it less than optimally and then had to carry around that mistake for way longer than was necessary. Jennifer Tilly's high stakes hand against Patrik Antonius springs to mind immediately and I presume Ryan Leng still hasn't shook off his notable error against Jungleman last year at the World Series of Poker.

You need to thick skin to do well at poker and I can only imagine that being forced to play your hands on television only compounds this fact for most players. It's probably an opportunity to get better, albeit a very uncomfortable one.

I've written this before but I believe the Twitch streamers, if you follow them for any length of time, appear to improve exponentially once they start to attract a big audience. This could be a selection bias, this could be because the audiences inevitably go to the players who are performing better and growing over time. However, I have believed for some time that the Twitch streamers have improved at a massive rate because they are constantly being exposed to criticism and potential ridicule from their audience. Any mistake that a Twitch streamer makes has the potential to go viral and can follow them around for a very long time. They are going to learn from them much faster than the rest of us would because it is a more painful experience.

You don't want to be ridiculed again

Some people need pressure to learn and I believe that learning in public is one strategy a lot of people would benefit from if they want to make leaps and bounds in their own game. Think about Daniel Negreanu who took, what was by his own admission, an incredibly minus EV challenge against Doug Polk in front of a big poker audience. He lost seven figures but since then he appears to have been completely transformed into a modern era GTO player. It was most likely the challenge in and of itself that did this, but doing it in front of an audience must have compounded the process.

I try to practise what I preach by learning in public and subjecting myself to ridicule, in my own small way. If you check out the Chip Race YouTube channel there are many videos on there where I have my play reviewed by Dara and David during deep runs I made in Unibet tournaments. I could have easily picked hands where I believe I played them well but if you watch the videos I tend to pick out the hands that I completely messed up, as I felt that that was the best area for me to learn about the very many leaks that I have. It's not a particularly pleasant experience to do this especially when Dara and David inevitably make fun of me. But you really do pay attention when you are being subjected to ridicule in the public square, because you do not want it to happen again.

To his credit Phil Hellmuth took the teasing that he received very well and even joined in on social media. However, I don't think he is going to particularly learn from the experience in fact he is probably going to complain about bad beats live on TV the very next one he receives. Just because he doesn't learn from the experience of being so vulnerable it doesn't mean you can't, and it really can be as simple as posting a hand in our forum or, better yet, starting a blog in our Bankroll Challenge.

Do you learn more when you risk making yourself look silly? Let us know in the comments: