The Jordan Harbinger Show - 57: Phil Hellmuth | The Winning Strategies of a Certified Poker Brat

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Phil Hellmuth (@phil_hellmuth) has won the World Series of Poker 14 times, is in the WSOP's Poker Hall of Fame, and is the author of New York Times Best Seller Play Poker Like the Pros and Poker Brat: Phil Hellmuth's Autobiography. What We Discuss with Phil Hellmuth: The epiphany Phil Hellmuth had in his early twenties that set the course for the rest of his life. Nonverbal tells and body language for reading other people at the poker table. Why poker is more about playing the people across the table from you rather than the cards in your hands. How poker players control their emotions while playing. How Phil's mindsets and key belief systems have helped him excel in the world of poker and beyond. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Today, we're talking with Phil Helmuth. He's won the World Series of Poker 14 times, 14 bracelets, and he's in the Poker Hall of Fame.

He has a reputation as a brat who has meltdowns. In fact, his book is called Poker Brat. I know him somewhat differently as a warm and super-carrying and very sharp guy, actually. Today, we'll discuss some of the obvious, like nonverbal tells and body language to read other people at the poker table, and we'll explore some of the less obvious angles,

such as why poker is more about playing the people than the cards and how poker players control their emotions while playing, which is a bit ironic from someone famous for their explosive blow-ups on national television, will also uncover some of Phil's mindsets and why he thinks these key belief systems have helped him achieve so much in the world of poker and beyond. All this and a lot more in this episode with Phil Helmuth, Worksheets today, man, they're going to be pretty chunky. There's a lot of practicals.

If you want to grab those and solidify your understandings of everything we talk about here today, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast and click the show notes. That's what those worksheets are. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be ideally in every episode, and this episode has a lot. The worksheets are how we make sure of that. Again, those are in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. All right.

Here's Phil Helmuth. Let's start off when you were smoking pot, playing pool, and you said, what the hell am I doing with myself? In my book, Poker Bread, I call that I can see the light chapter. So I remember that day it was miserable when I woke up. And, you know, poker players wake up late. Maybe I was up at 10 a.m. And there was a poker game at 11 a.m. But meager stakes.

We're talking $2 and $4 limit for any poker players out there. If I get really hot, maybe I could win 300. and I had like $20,000 in the bank. So why are you trying to go play poker to pick up $300? And yet I didn't have anything else to do in Madison, Wisconsin. And so I drive across town to play poker and I'm restless. And I tell my friends, hey, let's go out and have some fun. We drive a half a mile to this local hole in the wall bar.

We go in there. We smoke pot and we're on our first drink. And my friends are playing pool for $10 or $20 a game. when I'm getting involved. And I'm just, I'm frustrated with the action. And I'm just like, I suddenly felt like an awakening.

It's like, many days go by water flowing underground. Yeah. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. It's like the talking heads where you just wake up in this horrible moment and say,

what has going on in my life? It was like 22 or 23 years old. And I'm like, I got to get out of here. I mean, something weird is happening. Let me get out of here immediately. I think I call it.

for a taxi and then I open the side door and boom and the sun is it's just like this bright light imagine this dingy poorly lit bar and boom this light just hits me and I'm like wow you know it's a symbolic of something maybe and I'm like get out of here and I went back to my house and I decided all right I don't like the path of your life if you're going to be a professional poker player then you're going to become one of the best in the world okay and you're going to dedicate yourself to this craft of being great at poker. And so I immediately wrote down a life goals list. You know, one goal win the main event of the World Series of poker was the number one goal, buy a nice house, buy a nice car, or probably number two was meet and marry, an amazing woman. I think there were

five goals. And then one of them was write a New York Times bestseller. Why were you interested in writing a book at that point? Who cares about that at that point, right? Weird thing, but I had written a couple of pages of poker strategy and my friend had gotten a hold of it and he's like, wow, you're a really good writer. There was no evidence to suggest it was good writer. I never had to be in an English class in my life. But there's a difference between putting content out and putting content out that's technically correct. And so the reason I wasn't, you know, good was probably so I thought, wow, who cares about whether or not you can write well? And I've learned that skill too by waiting through literally a thousand pages of stuff that I've written that's just marked and read.

My skills have improved there, but who cares about that? You hire an editor for that. Yeah, of course. Then I wrote down this, what I called the winning pyramid. I was like, okay, you have these goals now, all right, let's take a look at your life. Okay. And so the pyramid on the bottom, all right, let's make sure we're not doing drugs. Let's make sure we're not an alcoholic. Let's make sure we're not a compulsive gambler. That was kind of my bottom row. How worried about that were you at that point in your life? Were you thinking like, hey, but for the grace of God, go I down the path of drugs, alcohol, or like losing control of how much I'm gambling?

So easy to do that when you're a professional poker player. No one's looking over you. Large amount of cash as a commodity. And so it's easy to use that cash to do whatever. And luckily, I think it had a lot to do with the way I was raised, where I just wasn't as interested in that path. In fact, I was repelled by that path. Now, maybe the next level up on the pyramid is, hey, let's like, I don't know how important it is,

but let's get the diet right. You know, let's start eating healthy food. And at that point, of course, we thought healthy food was probably bread. Yeah, like, hey, there's no fat in here. It's good for me. It's a lot of sugar, carbs. Now I'm on the opposite kick. But then, you know, then you put discipline.

And at the top of it all is money management. Because if you don't have money management and you can't pay your bills on time, it's going to be a miserable existence, said, all right, by the time I'm 45, I want to have enough money where I'd never have to worry about money again. And I have the discipline to get there. So huge day in my life was that kind of what I think is, you know, I can see the light day. That was 1988, let's say. And then I met my wife after I won the main event in 89.

May 18th, I won it. I met her two weeks later. Kathy, because she popped in so quickly. She found my goal list in 1990, and by then I was in a penthouse condominium on the lake. Check, one of my life goals. I had met and married an amazing woman. We're still together 28 years later. Check.

These list of five goals. I'd won the main event. Check. Of course, I had a couple of really nice cars then. Check. And so, you know, four of my five life goals are done so quickly. And so the New York Times one just sit there and sit there. And I just remember in 2003 when I saw poker coming.

And I had no thought of writing it. Let's be honest. I wasn't thinking I was going to write a New York Times bestseller. But I thought, let me put a strategy book out there in front of the wave. The poker wave. Like the incoming, this is going to be huge because everyone's talking about it. Yeah. I mean, I thought poker would be a wave.

I didn't imagine it would be as big as it was. But I knew that we were playing a game that everyone at home could relate to. too. I knew that we were playing. I mean, bowling was hot at that point. And bowling was 25K for first place. What's the in the world? Right. The world bowling grand prize was like 25K. Yes. And now ours is two million. Yeah. And anybody can play. And it's bowling. You know whether you're good at bowling or not. Poker, you don't know. There's a mystery there. Yeah. And so I threw this book out, play poker like the pros in front of the wave. And then a year later, Harper Collins calls me up. And I'm like, wow, New York phone call. Better pick this up.

on my cell phone and they're like, Phil, where are you? I'm like Lowe's Hotel, Santa Monica. And we just sent a bottle of Dom Pernia onto your room. You're now a New York Times bestseller. And I walked around high for two weeks because that's another lifegoop! Yeah. Ching!

Off the list. So five, you know, the five goals that I wrote are done. Now you add to that list, I added in 1993 after I won three bracelets. I said become the greatest poker player of all time. And now, by record, technically I am, but you know, there's a couple other people out there in contention that are great. Sure. And Ivy has 10 bracelets. So, and he's, I feel like he's going to put up at least 20.

And I'm at 14. So I have to get to, you know, like kind of a lifetime goal of 24 bracelets for me. I feel like I'm going to get there. I also have nine seconds, a bunch of thirds. I mean, it's, you know, I've done pretty well at the series. Yeah. That's when I really dedicate myself. to poker. When you say you dedicate yourself to the craft of poker, what's the part that

rusts first when you don't play competitively at that level for a while? Like what's the first subset skill that subset of skills that goes downhill? That's a good question. And by the way, I've cost myself some bracelets by not staying current. So I didn't want to burn myself out. And so you look at maybe 04 when I was working for four different companies. And I worked 340. 30 days out of the year. I mean, I look back at my schedule. Every day's marked. And I'm like, what is this? I mean, how could you work this hard? And I realized I was getting paid a lot of money. We didn't know how long it was going to last. Same thing, 0506. So I was ready with all the responsibility I had to all these companies to play less events. And so for sure, I stopped playing

a lot of high stakes cash games from 05 to 2010. I just wasn't getting enough reps in all of the games. imagine world championships being about seven different games. Everybody knows about Holdem, if you know poker. But there's actually six other games. You have Limit Holdom, for example. You have Pot Limit Hold'em, but you also have seven card stud high, seven card stud high, seven card stud low, seven card stud, high. Omaha high. And so you have these games.

And to be able to master all of them is important. And so I was literally playing these games once a year at the World Series of Poker, Duce to Seven. limit. One of my favorites at the low ball where there's two betting streets and just so much fun to play. And so to be able to not play enough, to be able to only play these games once, twice, three times a year and then go into the World Series, I hurt myself. So in 2010, I went online and I started playing small stakes tournaments just for five, six days, just seven, eight hours a day. Just to kick off the rest. That's it. And you exactly what you said. said, kick off the rust. And so just by playing, I'd be like, oh, that's right. You have to do this

in that game. Oh, that's right. Because you learn all of those games by playing cash games. I had to play all those cash games, all those games to make a living in the 80s and 90s, because there weren't enough tournaments. And so I became, you know, world-class and proficient in all those games. And so for me, it's a matter of reps. And so I try to go into the series. I try to go into the series and spent three days playing, you know, a mix of those seven games. But I think, I think this year I'm going to also make sure that I play some of these games online. So when I get to Nevada where online poker is legal, I'll start playing in a bunch of tournaments that involves all these different games.

And that's perfect because now you're practicing for exactly what you're going to need to do at the tables. So to knock the rust off, you have to do that. And I cost myself by not knocking off the rust for five or six years. I just come in cold. It was a mistake. Right. You learn the hard way by losing these really pricey hands, and then you go, oh, okay, I'm better at this now, but it's maybe too late to catch the winner. Exactly. Exactly. And if you come in really on point, really on form, there's this thing we call the zone. And the zone happens where, I mean, imagine just a kind of like, what would you call this, an up and a wave? Like a wave. Call it a wave, yeah. A wave on graph. Yeah, like a sine wave.

Correct. And imagine there's two sine waves. One is for how lucky you are, which. which is not follow a perfect graph, of course. That might spike up and down dramatically. But then also imagine your skills going up and down like this. Now, the range is a little bit more narrow when you become great at poker. You're never going to be truly bad at the bottom of the wave. But it just happens where, and the nearest thing I can think of is baseball, where someone's just hitting the cover off the ball, you know, for a month straight.

And all of a sudden they have a slump. And so if that sine wave happens to be up when I'm playing during the series, then, you know, always we have guys that are winning two bracelets. Every year, three guys win two bracelets. How does that happen? And I think they're at the top of the sign wave. They're playing great. And they're also catching some really lucky hands. I'll admit that part of it too.

So then when you do get lucky, can you take advantage of it and win? And so when they're both at peak, luck and skill. and, you know, not a lot of people can get to this huge high peak of world-class skill, you know, that's when you win. And so even those years where I didn't have to knock off, where I didn't knock off the rust, I would still go deep. I mean, it's just some years you just see things well. You'd said in the book that poker is a game about people that just happens to be played with cards.

I love that. And I want to get onto that in a bit here because it seems like when you were growing up, you had the slant system, which was actually just a total exercising cognitive bias. Like, there's no science behind that at all. Yes, I agree. And poker itself requires getting rid of that kind of bias as much as humanly possible. So can you tell us about the slant system and then sort of how you ended up getting growing through that? That's interesting.

I almost did include the slant system in the book. I was a little sensitive about this, but not, but I put it out there on a book that I think's going to sell tons of copies. So you take a nine-day period. Okay, day one is a day where you ask for something with positive, like positively, I want this to happen. And then day two would be where you ask negatively, I don't want this to happen, meaning you actually want it to happen. And then day three, you kind of have to do both. So a neutral system. So if you can imagine every three days, it cycles.

So one day's opposite day, one day is not opposite day. And one day, you don't know what you're getting. You have to ask for both ways. And so very interesting to come up with this at age, what, four or five as a kindergartner. And then I started to believe in my mind that it was working. And weird stuff happened, unexplainable stuff. Like, if I could remember what day it was, but I would, you know, it's not like I asked for something every day. And I remember saying, I don't want this to fall off my dad's car as he's driving because I was

mad at them and it fell off the car. That's just too freaky. Yeah. That's too freaky all the weird stuff that happened to me. And it just makes no sense. You would say, of course, that just happened. You know, the scientific explanation. There's a million scientific explanations for that. And then I remember in a pageant with, I don't know, 23 kids in my class where you drew to be king and I asked to be king. I didn't know what day it was. And then I asked negatively to be queen with the second drawing, just figuring I can throw it back. And I was drawn. And so there were just example after example where this would work for me. I even taught Chris Farley, this system. He's the only person I taught. He was one of your early friends. Chris and I were great friends. And, you know,

he lived across town, but we both went to Edgewood High School. And his grandmother lived in my neighborhood. So we spent a lot of time. He would just go to his grandmothers. And we hung out a lot in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade. And we were verging best friends. And he's the only one that I taught this system to. It's a weird thing. First of all, I recognize all of this is weird. And I recognize, especially on your podcast, everybody's laughing at me. It's okay. I'm going to go through with what I'm going to continue the story. I think that I remember very clearly thinking, I have this power, but I'm going to forget it exists. So I'm just going to lock into something positive the rest of my life. So I had a lot of time to think about this and then I'd

forget about the system for two months. And I just remember having this strong thing. You better lock in the rest of your life. And that was the day I taught Chris Farley the system. And that day, I asked for whatever, I asked for all of these things the rest of my life involving fame and fortune. And I understood even at a young age finding the right, you know, women was important, right? And so I ask for all of these things and put it out there in the universe, having completely believed in this system, having believed this was the most powerful day of my young life, was to put out my wish list, which I knew was going to happen. And so when you untangle that a little bit, either I was a complete lunatic, which, of course, I mean, you were a kid, so it's hard to judge that. Hard,

to beat me up too much for that. Is there some power, I asked you, is there some power? Is there some power in really believing something will happen. There can be as long as you're willing to take the actions to make that happen and you're not just trying to imagine a Ferrari into your driveway, you could definitely focus on something and continue going in a certain direction. But it's not, it doesn't have to be mysterious. You can just also focus on that thing and have that happen. Drawing the queen out of the head or having something fall off your dad's car, probably more

an exercise in cognitive bias, you know, confirmation bias and things. like that. So my question does become, poker requires getting rid of that kind of bias as much as possible. You and I talked earlier via email about Annie Duke, who I just spoke with, I think like three or four days ago. And she was, her book, Thinking and Betts is all just getting rid of bias and making better decisions. So this slant system is kind of like something that Annie Duke would go, oh my gosh, get rid of, you know, forget all of this. Get rid of that as much as possible, because that's just going to make you make bad decisions. So when you see bias and things like that creeping into your decision-making process when you're playing poker. How do you get rid of that?

Well, it's interesting. You can get on the wrong track quickly, right? And that's by making, I just even listening to my, you know, my son last night who hasn't played poker in a long time, but came to me after a tournament that him and his girlfriend played. And I was very happy. They went and played and, you know, 20 people at somebody's home. It was like a social poker thing. And he came to me and he said, well, I had Ace King and I hit a King. And so with four, cards on the board, it's about what is the bet sizing? Okay. Now, let's not, to throw the people off at home, let's not talk about any more specifics. That was kind of a good description for the poker players. The question is this. If he bet in this case a lot of money, yes, he would have won the pot.

Because he didn't, the other fella hung around and hit his card to beat my son. So my son's like, I should have bet more. I should have bet more. No. you lost that hand and now you're writing a story, you're writing a script for the cards were coming this way. You already know the cards were coming this way. And so you're writing in the script of I should have bet more because I lost this hand. Right. Hindsight bias or something like that. Hindsight bias. Exactly. And so then the next time you have that hand, you're like, I need to protect this. And so it happens to people when they're snake bit in poker where they're getting unlucky hand after hand after hand. So, you know, I've been very lucky for a few months. Every time I have pocket jacks, I win.

Well, pocket jacks don't win that often, okay, in a no limit holding game with eight or nine people. So when people start to get unlucky, when they start to run bad for whatever reason, then they start saying, oh, I have to bet more to protect my hands. I have to bet more to protect my hands. Yes, betting more does protect your hands. And if you bet an infinite amount of money relative to the table, each time you have these strong hands, you're going to keep winning those pots until someone actually has you beat. So, yes, by increasing your bet size, but that's not the right move. Okay.

And so people get off track when they're running badly, right? And then when you're running well, you can also get off track. You know, I kept winning, you know, it's strange. I mean, I know how lucky I was. I've won a lot of money. in the last year and a half. A lot of money. And so it's been nice for me, right? And so I keep kind of betting people in. So I'm betting smaller amounts with Jacks because they keep winning for me. And I want more people in there. And then it's possible that if I started losing with them all

the time, I would then over bet a little bit. But I think this is what I've studied my entire life. And I'm pretty happy with the adjustments I've made. So I'm not falling into this bias of I'm getting unlucky, I need to protect my hands with big bets. Mistake. You don't want to protect your hands with big bets. You want to bring people into the pot. You want their money in there. Yes, they're going to outdraw you 20, 30 percent of the time on the river. But then you've also made them pay money to try to outdraw you versus, you know, just betting a huge amount and just winning close to 100 percent of those pots. Okay. So you can see where there's a bias in there. And, you know, by betting too much, you know, in order to protect your hands. That happens when people are unlucky for a stretch of time.

They begin to play poorly. And then you have, you know, and then there's the amateur bias. Oh my God, that I see my whole life. And we've had guys, imagine this folks at home. We've had guys win poker tournaments coming in as stone cold amateurs, overvaluing a whole sheet of hands. Okay. And putting in large amounts of money with all these weak hands. And it just so happens for one tournament, they get away with it. They have the Queen 10. They have the Queen Jack. And they keep putting in way too much money and they keep winning with it. And they end up winning a tournament and $300,000. And they're like, oh, poker's easy. Yeah? I want to play with that guy every day for the next three years because he's going to get punished for that list. And so you can see there's this,

bias of not understanding the value of hands for amateurs, you know, and how sometimes that leads to victories. All in all, that much luck in poker is great for me, right? It's great for all the pros. Because you know it'll run out and you can capitalize on it. They're going to break our hearts a couple of times doing what they do. And I'm going to go poker brat postal. Yeah. Poker brat postal on them when, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you look at, you know, YouTube and you can see me. Oh, I did after we had phone calls and after I'd already spoken to you a bunch and I was like, I can't believe this is the same guy. You booked me and then you saw the, and then you saw the poker brat YouTube and you're like, oh, shit. Do I want him on my show? Now what's happening.

Yeah. Now what's going to happen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you mentioned that you in poker that it's more about other people's hands than even your own hands. So you don't play the cards. You play the player. That's kind of what it sounds like you're saying, is you let these people's, you actually let the other people's bias creep in. You don't just signal the obvious, oh, if I bet heavy, I can protect this hand. You go, well, if I play this way, this person's going to, it's like chess in a lot of ways. You think, okay, if I bet this way, they're going to draw in more, I'll draw more money out of each player. And you try to call out bluffs and make people mad. I think this you called going on tilt and it causes them to make mistakes. Can you explain that a little bit? How do you? how is getting other people on tilt more than just being like, hey, you're a dumbass, and then they get all mad? Like, you're very careful with the way that you do this. Well, if poker is about people and not the cards, how are you winning? Right. Doing that. And first off, there's some very elegant theories since 2004, really since 2003, people have been dissecting how to play poker perfectly on the internet. And so you have poker on the internet and you have poker in the real world.

They're kind of separate beasts. And so these players have come up with these elegant theories on exactly how much to bet, what hands to play. And then everybody, and then they kind of like, they run us a pack. And everybody's like, well, this is the way to play perfectly. And someone wins a tournament and he posts, I won a tournament playing this way. And they all feel that this is the right way. Okay. And then imagine, you know, imagine I'm holding my hand a foot above.

This is the way they play. And then all of a sudden. I figure out they're playing that way, so I take advantage of it. How by reading people? I know what they're doing. And so then it's a matter of you're going to play a lot of hands. I'm going to wait till I know you're weak and I'm going to re-raise you when I'm weak. And that allows me to win.

And then two years later, they all lower your hand afoot. They all play like this. And then two years later, they all play like this. And on top of it all, after changing from this is the perfect strategy every two years, they insult me along the way. Phil doesn't understand poker. Oh, yeah, I've heard that. Now, that's funny to me. Also, bothered me more than it should have for a lot of years and caused me to be very defensive, which I regret, but it's good television. And so every couple of years, they say, oh, this is the perfect strategy. And I look at it. I'm like, well, I see flaws,

but I really don't want to teach some of the flaws. And so then, well, Phil's bad at poker. He doesn't see that we're right. You know? Yeah. And so time passes. It's really interesting to see this kind of moving target on what perfect poker is. But even if they do discover the perfect way to play Hold'em, which they're a long ways away from, even if they did discover that, they still have to look at me.

They still have to put the chips into the pot. They still have to look at their whole cards. And those are the things that you're looking at to read people? Is that why you're telling us? Correct. Yeah. I mean, of course, there's evidence of. of me making all kinds of great reads and all kinds of laydowns that blew professional

poker players minds how could Phil fold that it was the best fold I've ever seen in my life Daniel Negron you same thing kid poker I give him credit he's like you have exactly the six seven of diamonds and the guys looking at six seven of diamonds and the viewers at home are like WTF how did that happen what is going on here well Daniel's making a good educated guest based on the board and the bet and he happens to be perfect the fact he threw diamonds out there was random. It could have been six, seven a spades. He had a one and probably three chance of that because he could probably eliminate some other hands based on. And so it's pretty cool when you see when you see me telling somebody you have pocket tens. In my mind, through my vast experience,

I've isolated it down to, you know, nines, tens or jacks. And I've taken an educated guess that it's tens. How? By playing thousands of hands against people and knowing how comfortable and how confident they were in their hand. It's a lot easier for me to turn pros hands to know what pros have, especially old school pros, because they would have a certain amount of confidence with the hand with nines, tens, or jacks. And they have another amount of confidence when they had aces or kings.

And any great professional poker player that has great reading abilities can always tell you, Doyle talks about this in his book, when your opponent has the best possible hand. And that happens where they have pocket aces And you're like, wow, you have aces, don't you? You know, and we know because there's a certain kind of movement that you make supreme confidence when you have the best possible hand. Is that different for each person, that movement that they make?

Or is it kind of generalized? Generalized. But, I mean, then you have to start saying, all right, how many actions are actually generalized? And then you start looking back at primates. You can go, I can go to a primate cage. And when the monkeys are really happy, they're jumping up and down. We call that happy feet. And when they're really sad, so we as a, we as a species share a bunch of characteristics and movements as far as, and so it's a matter of looking for the real subtleties in there.

You know, that's important. And so when I'm at the top of my reading abilities, then I'm great, you know, or the greatest when I'm at the top of my reading abilities. Unfortunately, they're not always perfect. But man, there's just tournaments that I've won because I just knew what everybody else had. I'll never forget, you know, the 2012 World Series of Poker Europe, and that paid a million euros for first. I didn't even look at my whole cards most hands. I just watched what everybody else did.

And I must have made 160 moves based on knowing that they didn't have it. Okay. Really? And got away with 158 because they weren't trained to call. So I just adjusted. Okay. If I know their week, how much can I raise? they're just forced to give up. And so then common theory was just raise a little bit,

but I'm like, no. If they open for 2x, we'll just say 2x, the big blind is X, $100, so $200. If they open for 2x, I'll raise, I'll call that to and raise 7x. Well, they're not used to people doing that and they didn't have theories written for how to handle that at the time. So I would just come in and raise 7x, 7x, 7x. So I'm just pounding with these huge bets. And they're just folding and folding and folding. Why? Because they have nothing and they have no defense. And I won that tournament, the best tournament I've ever played in my life. And then when we made it down to the final four players, I looked down at pocket nines. Okay. And in what we call the big blind and someone raised with tens on the button. And something went off in my head. Avoid this.

The standard play, especially with me raising and raising and raising and raising, of course, was to re-raise him with nines. I'm sitting on like $7 million in chips. He has $1.5 million. Of course you get it in with nines, except there was an alarm bell going off in my head. On global television, by the way, live on global television. The alarm bell is going off in my head. So I just called. And it came King 10 on the flop, seven, and I let out for a little bit. and he raised me and I folded. I didn't find out to a couple hours later that, you know, one of the pros in the booth was going crazy. How did Phil know he had tens when he had nine? So that pro was also Antonio S. Fundieri, the magician, was going crazy during the whole telecast. How can Phil keep calling raises with 10 do soft suit in all these hands? Because I knew what

everybody else had. And so to be at that level, that's a place almost no one gets. And if I were at that level all the time, I wouldn't have 14 world championships and nine seconds and whatever and all these other tournaments. I'd have 28 by now. And so that's the optimal way to play poker. Now, most people don't have that. Most of us do not have that reading ability. Maybe 3% can read at that level. Maybe 1% of humanity can read people at that level. Okay. And so that's why we have all these elegant mathematical theories designed. Right. And so sometimes the young kids, you know, who are really, really math sharp, when I say

I read them as being weak or strong, it's like I'm talking in another language. Right. Sure. You are. Yeah. And so I thought, wow, to them, it's black magic. But I didn't like the term black magic. It's too many negative connotations.

So I invented the term white magic, you know, and say, I have white magic. So rather than just say, I read somebody well, I'd say, well, I'd say, well. well, that's white magic. And then that term went global right away. It sounds almost a little bit racist somehow. It does. But once you have the, that's why I like it. It does.

And that's why I get the explanation out there. I'm just, I just didn't want to call it black magic. Yeah. African American magic, please. Stop. Stop. No one's ever accused me of being racist. Well, okay.

So how much of the reading is conscious? You know, when you're looking at someone, you go, are you going, hmm, shoulders slumped a little bit more than usual? Are you just like, you know, that? guy, I'm feeling like he's weak right now. I mean, how much of it is in your head and it's really concrete? Good question. And then when you do have all the right signals, are they the signals that they're strong or weak? Right. I haven't been playing enough no limit where I'm paying attention to reads several times in the last few months. I knew something was wrong and I

re-raised the person. Yeah, something was wrong. They had kings. That was the one time I shouldn't have re-raised them. So that can happen too. So then you have to get the signals in tune. You can, people act differently when they're super strong and they act differently when they're super weak. And you have to be cognizant of which is which. And your question to me is, do I look for specific things? You know, we had a New York Times bestseller called Read them and Reap, which has some great stuff in there for people that don't have great reading abilities. But for me, I trust my reads. I've been watching a person play for an hour, you know, and I've seen a strong hand, I've seen a week hand, I know the difference.

I watch whether where they look with their eyes. And here's the thing. I like to play quickly in poker. So I'm fold, fold, fold, fold, fold. When I finally stop and study someone, they're just super nervous. They're like, oh, my God, Phil Helmue is staring me down. Yeah. And so immediately, after me folding, folding, folding, it feels like the whole room changes.

Of course, not the whole room, but just that table I'm at. And all of a sudden, everybody just stops in their tracks. Phil is studying me. And the other players notice it too. And then all of a sudden that person's nervous. They're easier to read. So if I studied somebody every single hand, it wouldn't be as effective. And so people give things away.

Can I tell you specifically what? You have to read, read him and read. To find out that stuff. And a lot of people's reads have improved by Joe Navarro's book. You know, but to me, it's the whole package. How did they put their chips in? You know, did they splash him in? Say a guy raised seven times in a row

when he always splashed his chips in, kind of picked him up and threw him. And this time he slides him forward. What is that? He's doing something different. And so I have to like interpret all these signals. Call it 10 different signals. But generally I just trust myself.

Deep in my gut. He's weak, Phil. You better re-raise him. He's strong, Phil. You better fold and get out of his way. way. And, you know, and for me, I have to trust my gut. But that is a very scientific process. I, in some ways, because I don't want to get caught up in the wrong signals. Right. So it's kind of a weird thing. And we, you know, and of course people recognize all over the globe. We have these

reading abilities. So it's not necessarily the specific thing that that that person's doing. It's specific to the person. So if I'm always throwing my chips in like this when I have a strong hand, then you know if I slide them in, maybe I don't have a strong hand and you kind of want to test that. But maybe the guy next to me always slides him in and now he's throwing his chips in. So is it different from person to person or versus the specific moves? It sounds like it is, right? I'll come back to the primate thing. Okay. Where a lot of us act exactly the same. But of course, yes, there's subtle differences because there's a million ways. to put your chips in. So yes, you're correct there. I guess I look for something maybe a little

deeper than that, but it all kind of presents a picture. So it's a full picture. It's not just the chips. It's the way I'm looking at my cards, maybe my posture, how much I'm talking, where I'm from the chips in. Talking's a big thing. Talking's a big thing. When, you know, usually I kind of foster this, all right, I'm known as a poker brat, but I really believe that 99% of the people love to play with me at the same table, want to play with me at the same table, want to play with me at the table and paid a lot of money to even show up and play with people. And the young pros love it when I'm at their table, especially when I berate them. Yeah. They love it. They text out, I've joined the club. Phil berated me. Thank God. They caught a badge of honor that I berated him. It's weird.

And so, and I like that when I'm being absurd and blah, blah, balk, barking and being the poker brat. And I see five of the kids with their kind of like imagine that their hands are in front of their mouths, like, like I'm showing you, but the public's going to have to imagine. of people listening and half of them, they're all laughing. I like that because I, because I recognize how absurd I am in the moment. And I also, it's nice that they can recognize, okay, that's just Phil losing it. Yeah. We can laugh at them, you know. And then there's always one or two people that I affect too much by going off a little bit. And then I have to apologize to those people and be kind of conscious of, wow, this guy suddenly hates me. And if, to be fair, if the random,

If a random person's at my table and I start going off on them, they're going to hate me. But if you've seen it a hundred times on television, then a lot less so. It's kind of like being in the, you go to a comedy club and the comedian's like, what the hell? Look at this guy over here. Don Rickles. Yeah. I've been watching Don Rickles the last couple nights and he just insults people. Yeah.

But it's a badge of honor to have to insult you. Yeah. Yeah, you want Don Rickles to go off on you. Sinatra loves it. Ronald Reagan loved it. all these, all these legends that he went off on, you know, a Phyllis Diller that I was watching in the last couple days. They love it and he's so clever and fun. And you know that he doesn't hate you. He's just, although to be fair, you kind of look like you hate the guy in the moment.

You look like on some of the YouTube stuff that I watched earlier this morning, I was like, oh my gosh. It's true. It's going on. There's that intensity that comes across to the person I'm talking to where like, oh, my God, Phil hates me. And what that is, is me playing 20, four hours in a tournament, three eight-hour days of perfect poker and having that person go so far off script that I'm supposed to bust them and yet they hit their three on the river. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I just see the absurdity of me playing perfect and some random guy playing like a complete, you know, jerk off who should have been broke 10 hours ago or 20 hours ago and then beating me and then I go off, right? But that the volume, the intensity of me going.

off is all about me playing 24 hours and just feeling this situation is absurd. But unfortunately, the person I'm saying it to is like, wow, Phil, it's just there's so much energy, so much negativity coming from him. And so you're right, it does look that way. But there's been so much of that. And I keep getting better and better at that. The one thing that the cameras never show is almost within one or two hands, I say, oh my God, I'm so sorry to that person. But they're not going to show the apology. Oh, they don't show it? ESPN doesn't care about that.

That's funny. That's Phil being, you know, an asshole. That's Phil being the poker breath. That's Phil being Phil. They don't show me saying, oh, my God, I'm so sorry I lost it. Well, that person who's feeling alienated in the moment is immediately from, you know, the number one player in the world. Immediately is like, oh, they immediately accept the apology. And remember, they're also stacking my chips.

So, I mean, I have apologized a thousand times, only one time or two. thousand times. Only one time did a guy not shake my hand. Really? And because, you know, they just like, oh, that's just Phil being Phil. And then I can smile and laugh and joke. And I can say, I'm just so sorry. I'm just like, that's just the poker brat. And I might say I'm a little bit sick in those moments. I'm like McEnroe screaming. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Now, great television, by the way. But of course, it would be, why would they ever show the apology one hand later and us making up and me saying, hey, you know, I'm going to buy you a bottle of Dom Parignon because I was such a jerk, which I've done a hundred times, right?

And I'll have that guy sent a bottle of Dom and, you know, maybe even in some cases have a drink with them. That's funny. Because I would imagine when I looked at some of those meltdowns on YouTube, I was like, what do you think? When you ever see those, do you ever watch replays? And you're like, oh, man, that's not. I do not look so good right there.

Oh, my God. Well, even worse than me going off, I understand that when I'm going off that I can't control it and I'm embarrassed by that. But even worse is when I get defensive for me. You know, because here I have all the records in poker. And then I let some professional poker player needle me. And what I found out was the producers of these shows every single time they're told to go after Phil. Go after Phil. It's going to be great television. And so I didn't even understand this. I'd come in expecting not to have people go after me and they're going after me. And now I'm all defensive and whatever.

So maybe 2012, I said, okay, I'm going to switch this. If this person goes after me, I'm going to destroy them. In other words, I'm great at this. I'm great at, you know, I mean, you want to play with me? The verbal sparring? Verbal sparring? I am going to take you down so quickly. It's crazy.

And I'll, and if I know I'm playing on a televised that went with Antonio or Daniel, I'm just ready. Because I know they're going to come after me. And I'm just like, all right, bring it. You know, and I'll immediately start with Antonio like, you're boring. You keep using the same stuff. Can you grow up a little bit and use new stuff? And I'm smacking them down a little bit. You know, so I've started to become a little bit more, the aggressor in those situations where I'm filming with friends.

Yeah. Yeah. Antonio, can you tell us. Antonio, the magician has fun to are. I know you pride yourself on your ability to read people. How did you discover you had this and how can people at home start to work on this particular skill set, whether it's in poker or just in, in their, life in general. Do you have any tips for people who are like, oh, I want to learn to read other people?

Okay. I would caution this with a be careful because it's pretty powerful to be able to do this. And most, and I really think that the world should own this skill. But when you're going to confront your primary relationship partner, okay. And you're going to, and you already know that if their eyes dilate or what's the other direction? Contract. Yeah, contract. If you already know that one means they're lying, and you go and you say, you know, when you put a drink in them and you say, I need to ask you a very serious question and you look them in the eyes, have you ever cheated on me? You know, and the eyes go the wrong direction. That's going to be, that's going to destroy a few

relationships. And so, you know, and so be careful with the skill, but it's, but it's super effective. Joe Navarro will tell you it's 99% the eyes. The eyes do not lie. And I would just say this, read the book to discover whether it's the contraction of the expansion. That's a lie. It can also mean, how dare you ask me this? I'm so angry my pupils are contracting. So it's not a lie. Oh, you're trying to give them an out?

It's an I'm going to cut your, you know, what off. No, no, because when you put somebody down and say, I'm going to ask you a serious question, they can't be mad at you for asking the serious question. Right? I mean, come on. It's a matter of setting it up. I feel like they could be pretty mad about that particular question. Read the book and make sure you get all the whole context.

We'll link to the book in the show notes because I don't want people to be like, hey, I didn't bother reading that book, but I did divorce my wife. Maybe read the book first. Yeah. Joe Navarro's a friend of the show. He's got great body language books, former FBI, everything. He's just, he's got it all together. I want to go back to something I read in poker bread as well about learning from your mistakes

because I want to know how you balance between learning from your mistakes. you know, catching yourself playing emotionally, playing on tilt, as you call it. I love that term. Beating your versus beating yourself up. You said, first of all, in the book, there's a lot of hands that you seem to remember exactly what happened, when it happened. And I thought, is this guy looking at tape? And now from knowing you for the little time that I have, I've realized it's all up here. I remember to every hand I played maybe for the first 15 years I played poker.

Yeah. Crazy amounts. Not necessarily faces. Yeah. But hands. Hands. It's unreal memory. Have you always had a memory like that?

Yes. Yes, for hands and specific. Yeah, it's been pretty cool. I mean, I'm not saying that I would remember a hand 10 years later, a small one. But any decent-sized pot that I played, I just remembered. Now, I don't do, you know, since 2001, I still remember a huge number of hands. But I think a lot of that stuff was easier to write about because locked into your mind are all the hands that you played. Yeah.

So how do you balance learning from your mistakes versus beating yourself? up and losing sleep over a hand that you did wrong. You know, it's one thing to go, all right, when I see this, I got to remember to do ABC versus like tossing and turning for three straight weeks going, I should have freaking folded. I knew it. And I can't believe I didn't call that guy. Like, how do you balance those two things? Because you do both of those things.

Nobody's lost more sleep in poker than me. No one's beating themselves up. Now, I've gotten better as I get older. So I might beat up my opponent being the poker brat, but I also beat up my opponent. myself even worse. But it never led to destructive behaviors. Thank God, because people that beat themselves up can get to destructive behaviors. Oh, I played horrible. I need to start drinking. So if I have that happen to me where I feel like, oh, I played horrible. I need to drink. And I'm like, well, not today because you feel horrible and you feel you need to drink.

You're not going to have a drink today. Tomorrow you can have a couple. You know, so anytime I ever felt like I needed a drink, I would never do that. Learning from your mistakes is, something where it helps to have a few different people you're studying poker with, number one. But basically, I was self-taught. For a number of years, it was just me. And I would sleep poker at night, you know? What did I do right here? What did I do long here?

Do I have a bias towards this specific play? I'm not sure I would fall into those biases in the 80s, you know? and even sometimes in the 90s. And so you have to take a play and not necessarily put it in a vacuum, put it in context of everything that's happening. Was this the right play for me to make it the right time? You know, and did I risk too much, too many of my chips? Should I have, you know, the number of times I've had chip leads and blown them for no reason

throughout my whole career is staggering. And I'd just be so mad at myself. What were you thinking? You know, I finished a second in bicycle club WPT in August. It was huge for me, September probably. And then I went back to L.A. and I finished 14th. But I made some mistakes. I was sitting on 700,000 in chips with 20 players left.

I never finish. I rarely finished 7th to 30th in a tournament. Usually if I'm there, I make it to the final six. And I looked back and I made mistakes. And I was pretty upset. I mean, drove me to fly to Florida to play a tournament. you know, just to like, all right, you know, and now, you know, in a couple days I'm flying to Belagio to play in another tournament. That's easier in Vegas. I think it's a matter of looking back

and saying, what mistakes did I make on this hand? And how can I avoid this in the future? And for a while, I got so far over on one side. I was tilted by bias towards one side, but I still think it's probably correct to be there. I never wanted to go broke on one hand. So I would avoid these huge, huge, huge hands. When I had Asa's or Kings, I would avoid going broke. It probably cost me more money, but it kept leading to deep runs, deep runs, deep runs, because I would always wait for a better situation.

And so then you have to balance that. Is that a mistake? You know, or not? These days, I probably would want to play the big, pop with those super strong hands where I was trying to avoid them a little bit more. We always have a tournament the next day. So how do you reel yourself back in when you find yourself going down that path of, man, I should have done this? I'm losing some sleep. I'm punishing myself. Do you have a technique where you go, look, enough is enough that hand is over or there's always

another chance to win up. What are you telling yourself to get back on track? Well, I think the worst was, I think it was a 2001 World Series of poker. I want to get that year. It's not important. but I remember finishing, I think, fifth in the main event. That one hurt. That one hurt. And so I felt like crap for a long time afterwards. And then we took a vacation. We went and rented boats in northern, northern California, Lake Shasta.

Oh, we've done that. Yeah. Did you do that? Yeah, it's awesome. It's fine. A little houseboat thing. Yeah. Yep.

Had a houseboat. And I insisted on beating myself up every day. You know, kind of punishing myself. intentionally. And I was like, why should I be miserable? Yeah, you messed up. And so then you kind of like, all right, this is too much. You know, if you're going to beat yourself up, then, you know, and every time you start to feel good, you think back to, I blew it and I finished fifth. You're with your wife and kids, man. Yeah. You know, come on. Let's just, when you're with them, let's just kind of put this away. So I kind of like, whenever I was with my wife and kids, I'd try

to move on quickly. And then as time passes, you realize that you just can't spend a lot of time beating yourself up. And if you have to intentionally beat yourself up, then it's not just a natural normal consequence. Let's not do that anymore. I will feel pretty staggered, even after a second place finish. I think I had three seconds in 2011 and just was like, went straight to the bar. I didn't drink excessive amounts, three or four, I'm sure, but when you start at 2 a.m. Yeah. But I'm with my best friends at that point. point too with my wife, with people that can support me. And so the kind of the cycle of making mistakes and getting them over there and getting over them decreases quite a bit.

How can you tell if you're playing poorly or if you're just getting unlucky? And more importantly, how can you tell in the moment whether you're getting unlucky or playing poorly so that you know when to walk away from the table? Because if it's luck, it's just math, stick around. Things will change. You keep playing right. You keep reading people right. Versus if you're playing poorly, maybe it's time to go. Such a fine line. Such a fine line. I remember playing a few years back in the one drop. Last year, the 100K one drop, I finished 10th. But it was a few years before that. And I was playing as fast as I've ever played, just raising and re-raising. And it looked like I was going completely crazy. Just getting every chip in all the time. It looked like I was a complete maniac. And,

And could have busted myself in a one drop before that where we had three million in chips. It was impossible to blow a million in ships. I mean, you would have to try or have some real unlucky stuff happened. I managed to blow 1.3 million in chips playing like every hand, playing like a complete crazy man, and having to gran you on my left, re-raising every hand and beating me a lot of pots. And I said, all right, I'm going to get him. So we have a thousand big blinds. It's as deep as you've ever had.

You had to play horrible. Well, fast forward, I kept playing fast. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to stick with it. I finally beat Daniel a huge pot. And because I'd been playing like such a crazy man, I was dealt aces. Another guy was dealt kings. And he put in like a thousand big blinds because I looked like I was crazy.

And so I went from really the guy who had blown all this chips and was like last place in 50 players to, boom, six million in chips and massive chip leader in that tournament. And so there is that fine line of playing fast. If you're going to come in playing that fast and you're not super deep, you're going to bust yourself. So then the corollary, the other side of that is in October. I was over in Czech Republic. And I played the first 13 hands in a row. And it looked like I was just a crazy man completely out of control, not folding a hand. And finally, I made a straight. And the other guy made a full house. But if he doesn't get lucky and make his full house, I'm going to be way up in chips. So it looks like, I mean, anybody that would say Phil played 13 hands in a row, he's legendary

for his patience. So that's a very fine line when you start to go crazy. You know what I mean? Because no one knows what to do with Phil crazy. And Phil crazy wins a lot of tournaments. In poker, Brett, you said, if you want to be successful, you need a healthy sense of entitlement. So what is that? Why is that important? Well, first of all, entitlement in today's day and age has become a bad word. Yeah, it's not a good word anymore. I don't know if it ever was, but it certainly isn't now. I think the reason it's a bad word is people associate entitlement with having too much entitlement. Yeah. But entitlement is just a harmless word. Do you have a healthy sense of entitlement or not. And for those people that do not have a healthy sense of

entitlement, it's going to hamstring them. It's going, it hurts them, in my opinion. Okay. And I have any science to back this up, but I watched it over and over again. People with a low sense of entitlement when at the table, when looking at doing great things, winning world championships, winning millions of dollars, completely fell apart. Now, and later I'd be like, like, why did this happen? And I'd find out, oh, that guy, well, he's a drug addict. He's an alcoholic. He abuses his kids.

He abuses his wife. All of this stuff. And so with a low sense of entitlement, there's a low sense of worthiness. Now, to come back to the other side of that, we all know people that have too much entitlement that are super successful. You know what I mean? And they're like, wow, that guy doesn't deserve this. doesn't deserve that. But who am I talking to in my book positivity and in my book poker brat? I'm

talking to the American public. I'm talking to the global public. And I think that there are ways to increase your entitlement and therefore increase your sense of worthiness. And so I think, you know, I remember for me, it hit home when I was about to become the greatest poker player of all time by bracelets. And I hesitated just for a little while there asking myself, do you deserve this? Are you worthy of this? And I thought, wow, this hesitation is what other people face in life when something great might happen to them. Now, in some cases, in cases of running companies, they may be on a path, and even if they want to sabotage themselves, they're not going to because they have a buffer, a board, and that's just going to propel them on.

But in cases where you can control your own destiny, you better work on your entitlement if you want to do great things in life. Simple. So for me, I said, all right, why not me? And why not me is a question which I associate with entitlement. Why not me? So I thought, okay, I'm someone who's never cheated on his wife. Now, that's important to me. Everyone else has their own code.

So I'm not preaching. Another guy might have another code maybe as an open relationship. Maybe it's in his religion to be able to do it. Maybe it's society norms to have four or five women. I'm talking about me. So, all right, what are my reasons? My code is not cheat on my wife. Never done that.

My code is be completely honest, you know, be perfect ethically and morally, so far above that even when there's questions in the poker world, you might actually pay someone $2,000, even though you know they're screwing you because you want to be on the right side of entitlement. people don't do that i do that yeah you think you deserve two thousand dollars even though we spelled the rules out five times you think you deserve a two thousand dollars back it's wrong but here's your two thousand but guess what i never have to hear from that person again right i've paid people just so i don't have to hear from them again and so that's way above and beyond you know and so i believe in that all right so perfect ethics morals okay then i understand i understand i understand

inspire people. People watch me on television and yes, they see poker bet, but they also see me do things that they can't do. When I watch Michael Jordan playing basketball, no one else could do what he did. When I watch Tiger Woods in his prime, where he seems to be coming back, doing like hitting the ball to two feet out of the rough from 250 yards, no one can do that. And so it's inspirational to watch a human being at the very top. So added to my list, I inspire people. I'm a really good father. I'm a really good husband. I'm a really good son. I give money to my brothers and sisters. I help them all pay for college and law school. Okay. We give money to charity. You know, these days, I've raised $52 million doing charity events. And so I have all of these things that says, why not me?

So by increasing my sense of entitlement, I increase my sense of worthiness. By increasing my sense of worthiness, I was able to not stop and not hesitate, but just go ahead and win. The advice point here, the action step would be do things that help other people or add some sort of other value. Therefore, in a way, you're coming in with a clean receipt. You've paid all your debts, whether or not you agree to them or not. Other people view it that way. You feel like your morals are super squeaky clean. Then you can sit in that tournament and go, I deserve this. I've been good and everything else. Why not me? Yeah.

Why not me? And so I don't hesitate. I just go for the, I just go right for the win every time. I don't have to deal with the messiness of not having the proper entitlement. And this is something I talk about in my book, Positivity, which I see that there's maybe not enough science for us to talk to me. Right. Yeah, I gave you a little crap about that on the phone, which you have a really good memory.

I thought maybe you would have forgotten about that. I did read positivity too. I just, I read poker brat. By the way, if you're going to read both of those, set the whole weekend. decide because a total, I think it's like 16 hours of reading. Well, positivity takes one hour. Right, and poker bread takes 15 hours. 14 hours. You need a lunch break in the middle. So yeah, it is my theory that, you know, and then you can square your entitlement too. Let's just say that you do see something that you've done poorly in the past or bad in the past. Then you have to forgive yourself for that or maybe

do something to correct that, right, to make up for that. So you can just by honoring your code, increase your entitlement. You can go back and look at things you're not proud of and say, okay, why did that happen? And forgive yourself from that. Don't let something that you did bad in the past. Hold you back from going full speed ahead in the future, which brings me to another thing, which I'll just bring up not even being questioned. And that's hate hurts you.

Yeah. Which I talk about in poker, Brett, and I talk about in positivity, getting rid of hate in your life. And to me, I invented this three-step process for getting rid of hate. I didn't see anything. I googled it. I looked for it for a year. I didn't see anybody else doing this. So I said, well, I love this three-step process.

I'll just put it out into the world and see what happens. Because too many people dislike or hate someone. And to the public, listening to this at home, I would ask you, take 10 seconds and think of the person that you hate the most. I'm going to give them five more seconds. Think of that person. If you don't hate them, think of the person. you dislike the most. Okay, I got to tell you, everyone listening, that person's not thinking about you.

Probably doesn't think about you much at all. You're wasting energy giving this person hate. Okay. And so hate hurts you. Well, Buddhism talks about that. So I invented this three-step process for getting rid of hate. To me, you think about why that person did what they did to you. is there a reason you can imagine that they did that? Did it benefit them? Was there a logical reason why that happened? Now, for a lot of people, the person they hate the most, there's no logic there. They have good reasons to hate it. That's a bad person probably that you hate. Okay, fine. So if you can't find any relief by thinking about why they did what they did, then ask yourself, is there anything good about that person. Are they a good wife, a good husband, a good father? Do they don't make money to charity?

Is there anything good that I can latch on to to assign to this person? So that's kind of the first step, asking yourself why they did it and is there anything good about this person? Second step is to ask, is there anything good in this person? You can usually find something good in the person. The third step, go to your bed during the middle of the day or even at night, but make sure you're not going to be disturbed. Tell your wife, honey, I just need a half an hour. Can you just let me have a half an hour? Or do it in the middle of the day when nobody's around and just start meditating. And what you need to do is just meditation's not hard. Just close your eyes. Don't think of it as meditation. Close your eyes and think about the person you hate the most. And that person will pop right

into your mind. Now, start sending love to that person. Whatever that means to you, start sending actual love to that person. It's amazing how that gets rid of your hate. It's amazing how that one step just alleviate so much of it. It's just gone so quickly. And usually while I'm doing that, I'll send energy to the person that I dislike the second most or third most. And then I can't help, but I'm like, well, if I'm doing this, let me send love to all the people I actually love. It's amazing how powerful that process is of forcing all that's in your mind, all the stuff we don't understand and do understand about the power of the mind and sending love to someone you hate. A very famous player stole $28,000 from me.

Annie Duke called me on the phone and said, Phil, $28,000 has disappeared from this account. I said, oh, don't worry about it. My friend, our friend is playing that account. She said, no, you don't understand. This money was transferred in a one-on-one match. The guy took the $28,000, bought in an online site against another opponent, turned out to be his brother, and lost $28,000 to him in three hands. It's impossible. I'm telling you it's impossible to lose more than $7,000 in three hands.

It was a limit game. And the limits were so small. But they just raised each other back and forth in infinite. amount of times. Why? Because they didn't want to pay the $3 per rake per hand to steal the $28,000. So you caught it really fast. This guy could have played a hundred hands against his brother, paid $300 and stalled $28,000 and gotten away with it. So now I'm like, what in the hell is going on here? And I'm just like, and I'm super pissed off. But I had been studying Buddhism and forgiveness. And so I was just steam for an hour. I called two of my friends up. And I said,

this guy did this and they said fry him release the stuff to the world you have them right here all you have to do is release it to the world dead to rights he'll never work in this town again yes dead to rights and i thought what good does frying him do me just feels good for a short period of time ah sure sure i might feel good so i molded over for an hour and a half i called my friends and i said bury this i called annie duke and i said bury this i don't want to destroy this guy's reputation but Besides, half the money was his anyway. Can you imagine stealing 14,000 of your own money? Half the money was his. So he only took 14K. And I'm going to make him pay me back. And meanwhile, I'd called the guy up. And he's crying in tears because his reputation's just gone if I just press a button. And this was a Monday. And so an hour and a half passes. I told my wife, I'm pissed off. And I said, honey, you know what? We're looking at this wrong. How about if we just recognize. what we have in life. All these world championships, money to live comfortably, money coming in all the time. We have each other for, what, 15 years now, whatever it was. We have great kids. Everybody's healthy.

You know, I've become world famous. Let's just go celebrate our lives. And we went to a local restaurant and bought a bottle of Chateau de Kemp. And it was your most expensive. It was my favorite of the time. I paid $500 for the bottle. $400 is the most we could spend. We spent as much as we could on a beautiful meal, just the two of us. We drank that bottle. I drank probably most of that bottle. I'm not a big drinker.

And that was a Monday. Now, fast forward Thursday, I flew to the East Coast, where this guy was, we're playing in a big tournament at Foxwoods. Remember, he had stolen $28,000 from me. But I had already forgiven him. And I want to be able to walk down the hallway of life. and never have to turn left or right. I don't want to be the one turning left or right.

If somebody else wants to turn left or right, that's okay. But I don't want them to turn left or right. I want to be able to walk down the hallway of life and never have to duck anybody. And sure enough, I'm walking down this massive hallway at Foxwoods. And there's the guy. And I went right to him. And he was just like, I had already told him I was going to bury it. And he shook my hand.

and he went immediately to his knees crying. But it didn't feel great to shake his hand. Yes, I'd used my own exercises, but it was so fresh. It didn't feel great, but I did shake his hand. Then I entered the $10,000 Bind tournament. And I will guarantee you, if I release this on the internet, I would have just taken a big thing. Imagine a big, like, all this mud next to me.

And I would have just thrown it. I don't live in a glass house. I live in a solid house. He couldn't throw anything back. at me. But why do I want to be throwing mud? Every single high limit player in that room would have come up to me and said, is it true? Did he do this? And I would have had to say yes. I would have had hundreds of conversations from the whole room about how this guy stole $28,000 from me. Instead, not a peep was mentioned. I had my headphones on. I'm playing poker. I'm in the game, man. And I don't know,

maybe we had 700 people in it. And we get down to the final three. And for me, it was a, you know, a dream come through to win a WPT. And unfortunately, I finished third. But when I saw that I cashed for exactly $280,000, I just couldn't help but just laugh out loud. Oh, my God. I would not have made a penny if I were fighting with this guy the whole time. Instead, I won 10 times exactly. And you might say it's a coincidence.

It might even be 20 times, considering 14 of it was his in the first place. Correct. Correct. But there's no scientific explanation for this. and I'm sure that we can, we can, we can, we can remote it out and deduce it out. It's a good anecdote. You won 10 to 20 times as much. But we'll go with the antidote.

Let's go with the anecdote. And, and I was so happy. And I'm like, all right, this forgiveness stuff, which I use anyway, now it's on for life. You know, because wow, you can, I can't explain this. It's like somebody somewhere, it's like the universe is telling me, you know, or the powers it be, or whatever you want to call it, is somebody somewhere is telling me that this is good. Maybe I'm telling myself. Maybe. Maybe I knew it was 280,000. Maybe I tried to finish third. Whatever. I don't think so. Yeah, I doubt you tried to finish third instead of first or

second. I did not try that. In fact, I had the other guy all in. And if he doesn't outdraw me on the last card, I would have been heads up and maybe won it. Story of your life. So very frustrating with the result. But wow, to see it was exactly $280,000. And so that's powerful. Because you go in with a clean receipt, you don't feel like you have to worry about it. You've processed and done with it. Done. You're done with it. Done, done, done.

Now, what the amazing thing is about this is this guy is a famous player, right? He defends me. And so my wife, about five years later, maybe by 2010, she said, this is your biggest defender in the world. He paid me back to 14,000. We're a lot more friendly. We had a meal together in 2010, right? And I feel like I've 100% forgiven him or at least 99.9. I don't think about it.

I think of all I think when I think about him is this guy that's defending me. I think it's 100% forgiveness. And every time I'm at the table with him, which isn't that often, he's defending. If anybody says anything negative, boom, he defends me. When I'm not around, he defends me. Always saying great things. I saved his life a little bit after he did me wrong. And so what have I had by just forgiving someone?

I got paid back in full. I won $280,000 and he is gone forth as a Phil Apostle. Apostle's a bad word. Evangelist, maybe? Yes, yes, an evangelist. He's evangelizing. What a great guy. And he has a big voice.

That's nice. It's good to go in with that clean receipt, man. I agree with you there. You also talk about balancing negativity. When there's not enough, you need a little fire. But when there's too much, you play even worse. So how do you moderate that? Forgiveness is definitely one of those things that would help with that, right?

Instead of whining about this guy, even though you had great reason to, you let it go, that moderates the negativity, but it's not completely gone. What else? What else can you do? Let's say there's nobody to forgive and you're just a shitty mood. What do you do to mitigate that? That's a good question. And some of my worst moods are after I bust out of a tournament. So I bust out of a tournament and, you know, I start walking down the hallway.

I'm trying to get out of there. And or maybe I've already walked a casino over and someone sees me. They don't know I've had a bad day. They just know they're a huge fan of mine, right? And I'm not saying that, you know, I'm an A-List star, but I'm saying my fans are very, very, very powerfully behind me. It's crazy. And so I'll see someone and they're just lit up.

I can see their face. They're lit up to see me. Phil, can I have a picture? And I'm in the worst mood. Well, I learned a long time ago, you smile and you take the picture, right? I smile and I take the picture. There's always a little residual. I'm not expecting it.

And I smile and I shake their hand and I say, good luck and maybe give them a word of encouragement or whatever. But I kind of move on fairly quickly. And then I'm 50 yards away and they're screaming, that made my year unbelievable. And they're just screaming. That was Phil Helmuth. Maybe I've taken four or five pictures with their group. And it's like, oh my God, really?

I mean, all I feel like is a poker player that's just busted out of a tournament. I don't feel special. I mean, on a daily basis, I don't walk around feeling special. And if you do, then it's bad for your ego. But then I'm suddenly reminded, wow, I just gave that person some inspiration. And so I'm just all of a sudden rather than, you know, 100% down, now I'm 60% down or 50% down. And then someone, I'll run into someone else and they want a picture in an autograph or whatever. And so I get to my room.

I'm not nearly as bad as shape. And so that's dealing with some negativity post or being in a bad mood. Dealing with negativity in the moment at the table, you know, getting unlucky in a pot or misplaying a pot. If I misplay a hand, I'll beat myself up a little bit. Like, what was I thinking? How could I do that? And then sometimes there is too much negativity when I'm at the table. And then I try to break out of that.

I've discovered a long time ago when everybody at the table is in a good mood, I do better. So I try to like, I try to break out of that. fairly quickly and realize, wow, do you realize what you've done in poker? You know what I mean? So you zoom out a little bit and you go, all right, this one negative event or set of negative events, if you zoom out far enough, you see all of the good and all the positivity and it sort of washes it out. And then there's a times where I'm just incorrigibly negative that happened last year twice. And the press was there, both deep runs, won a limit holdom tournament where someone put a horrendous they they called all this money trying to hit exactly a queen and hit it and I just went crazy I wouldn't let it go

and that cost me because I think if I would have let it go and change and my parents were there too they were on the other side of the room and my wife and a bad bad bad bad bad bad all negativity way too much negativity and I got stuck in that moment and I think maybe I finished 14th on a tournament where I should have finished higher. It's something that, you know, once a year probably it's hard to break out of that, you know. How of your skills helped you away from the table maybe in doing some other thing? Like you're in a business deal and you're like, you know, I'm just not getting, I'm feeling something about this guy because something I learned in poker is telling me that this guy is maybe

bluffing. Maybe they don't have financing and there's just money to us. You're dead onto something there. And I remember meeting Nick Stein, the famous CA agent. And after the meeting, he's like, I was so nervous about me. meeting you. And I'm like, do you want me to break it down for you? That's funny. He's like, yes. I said, you exaggerated here, here, here, here, and here. I felt like this was kind of a quasi lie, but I thought you were honest here, here, here, here, here, and I don't blame you for the

exaggerations and the, and he just started laughing, you know. And so yeah, you notice, I mean, stuff like that translates. In general, people don't try to lie to me. In general, schaisters don't even want to approach me. There are easier marks. I, you know, Right, and they have to get through my agent anyway. But yeah, it's helped me a lot, understanding people's intent. I can imagine it probably happens all the time, and then people realize, crap, he's looking at other people for a living. And other people are trying to hide their emotions during poker. So somebody who's coming up to you and trying to tell you a bunch of crap, better have their spiel down pretty tight. So what do you look for when you think somebody's exaggerating?

Because you mentioned before during poker, you're looking at their baseline the way that they're playing. What in a negotiation are you looking for? When you met with Nick Stein, how did you spot that he was exaggerating in those particular places? It's just a natural instinct, right? I mean, people, especially when you can look someone in the eye, when they're sitting across the table from you. It's one thing, sometimes poker they're at an angle, you know, from you. That happens all the time because poker tables are round. But when you're sitting across the table from me, looking me in the eye, you know, I think that it's, you know, I pick up a lot of stuff.

and it's just a natural normal thing. I don't even know how I do it. I just know that, you know, that's not right when you say it, you know. And then I have to go to deductive reasoning. Why isn't it right? I mean, usually it comes down to just two or three meta points. And it's pretty easy to isolate which one it is. So someone tells you my company is, you know, we have an offer for $640 million from somebody else.

And they're looking me in the eyes. And I'm like, that's not true. So what does it mean? Well, they may, it's true, they do have an offer from another company, but maybe it's 500 million. Okay. So that's one possible conclusion. Or they don't even have an offer from another company, which is another possible conclusion. And so, you know, then you have to figure out all you can do is give the pure information to the CEO and say, I think this is the case.

But he definitely was not truthful there. And you're thinking insert maybe in percentages, just like you would at a poker table. Like, 70%? Nope. Not even percentage. It's just like, all right, they're lying. Really? Why are they lying?

So you're pretty binary. They're exaggerating. Why are they? Yes. Huh. Okay. Interesting. But you don't know how you do that.

It's just been practice. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. And when did you discover that you were able to do that? Early on. Early on poker. I've always been able to.

And then, you know, and then the second skill is influencing other people to do what you want them to do. Manipation is a strong word. But maybe that would be accurate, too. And that's like, for example, when I throw my chips in and I get caught in a bluff and I flip the hand up, I have to memorize exactly what my eyes look like, exactly. Even more important is how did I put the chips in when I was bluffing? Did I move left? Did I move right? What did I say?

Did I put the glasses on? And the next time when you have that super strong hand, you try to replicate exactly that. Inducing your opponent into doing something. And so that's an interesting one that I, that I'm pretty good at as well. That's pretty fascinating. So you have to, you have to micromanage or monitor your own behavior and go, all right, I actually have a really weak hand. How exactly am I looking at my cards?

How exactly am I moving around? Am I talking? Am I not talking? Am I throwing my chips in or am I sliding? And sometimes in retrospect, sometimes you have to look back and say, I got caught. What did I do? Right. It's fresh in your mind.

That's a great opportunity. Getting caught bluffing? because now you know they're going to call you more often. Right. So then, all right, how can I mimic exactly what I did when I was bluffing, but this time I have it. Right. This time you're not bluffing. Oh, interesting.

You've got to do that in a real time, too, which is a crazy challenge, I would imagine. Well, not that hard because, you know, 30 seconds will pass before the cards are dealt. And by then you've already kind of isolated what it was. And then you might not pick up that strong hand for another five hands. maybe another hour. Yeah. But you have to be ready. The professional patience comes into play here.

One of the things that I read in poker bread that actually surprised me as well was you said that money management was actually more important than poker skill in your life. That was kind of surprising because I also read that you were spending at some point like $65,000 a month and you had to trim it down to $45. And I thought, one, what are you buying? And two, you must have a lot of Amex points. Well, it's interesting. You know, I would, in the past, I've been able to hang out with some amazing people.

And one guy was telling me that he was spending a million a month. And I'm like, how is that possible? My God. You know, very famous, you know, one of these very famous guys that sells a lot of products on television. And a million a month. And I thought, wow, that's impossible. And my friends are spending a couple hundred thousand a month right now. And it's pretty easy, private jets and, you know, mortgage payments.

when you buy a $30 million house, all of this kind of stuff. It was hard for me to believe myself that it was $65,000. And, but we did it. We looked at it. We did have two kids in college at that point. But that only explains part of it. Right. Yeah.

I was starting businesses, you know, I was paying, I think I was paying my guy $10,000 a month to kind of manage. And it just starts to go. It's just, it's really not a big, it's the funny thing is the people that are wealthy that are listening to this are saying, wow, you only spent 65. Yeah. But the most people at home were like, What? He spent 65. It's impossible. Yeah. It's like well above the average annual salary.

We tracked it down. My friend, some of my friends, some of my friends that aren't wealthy that didn't believe it, you know, or like, well, what exactly? And we looked at it and it just, it made sense. And so we had to cut down. It was important. But when it comes to money management versus poker skills, imagine a diagram. Okay. And say that your poker skills are 100. But just say that for whatever reason, your money management skills are 20. So that guy with 100 poker skills wins tournaments, wins millions of dollars, but then stays up all night. And when he's having that really bad day, loses $2 million. And you know what? People are going to loan him whatever he wants.

And that's poker right there. That's why I've been so introspective. One bad day could wipe me out because they'll loan you whatever you want. They know what you're worth. And one bad day, one bad decision where you play 48 hours straight can wipe you out. You lose everything. And so that guy with 100 poker skills when he loses everything and now he's a million in debt, he's going to climb out of debt.

But how is he going to pay his rent now? He owes a million dollars. He lost all of his cash, right? And presumably maybe he saved $20,000. Maybe he spends 10K a month. That's two months runway. Right? And so he has to get back and work hard and stress the bills and stress his wife or his partner saying, wow, where's our bill money?

That's a big thing. Now look at a guy with poker skills of 70, but money management of 100. This guy never loses too much money on any given day. So his worst days are going to be whatever. I mean, I have this rule in Vegas where I risk $10,000 a day. It's been amazing for me because I can. win a couple hundred thousand. But if I lose 10, I'm done. I force myself to quit. So you have those great money management skills. You and you have like a million dollars and you're still paying 10,000

a month, same as the other guy. You never sweat it. You have like 800,000 sitting in your box and your bank. Maybe people owe you a couple hundred thousand dollars. Maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars worth on your house and maybe a few investments. And you're just never sweating. 10K, 10K, 10K, 10. that's a smooth life. So that's why I claim money management skills are more important than poker skills because we're talking about life. So let's wrap with this. Tell us about the sign that you had on the mirror in the bathroom growing up and how that affected you. Big time. I have this new article, Million on-air magazine or whatever where we just asked 20 questions and it's called positivity. I'm doing it. I'm going to ask Jack Dorsey and Cheryl Sandberg. So this sign basically said,

you are what you think, you become what you think, what you think becomes reality. I'm going to repeat that. You are what you think. You become what you think, what you think becomes reality. And my mom had this sign hanging on our bathroom mirror, but understand five kids and my parents. That's seven showers a day. We all were on the same floor. There's only one shower in the house. So all of us, you know, going through there, brushing our teas and all the like steam that comes out from showers. And the end of a year later, two years later, it would be so dingy she'd replace it. And I really think that was a powerful sign for me and my brothers and sisters.

My brother has a law for me as 57 attorneys working for him, Helmuth and Johnson. My sister, Kerry, has been a world-class cyclist and was asked to join the first team USA. except she broke her, had a serious leg break and went a different direction. She also has her law degree. And she just got a PhD in Italy for economics. My sister Molly was voted a top 100 scientist in the world. She was the keynote speaker at a conference that Al Gore showed up to, you know, Molly Helmuth. And my sister Ann is Special Olympics and has won a bunch of gold medals there.

I believe that sign had a profound impact on our family to believe that what you thought was going to become reality, then why wouldn't you think big? Why wouldn't you think, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. And once you start doing it, once these thoughts do become reality, you're like, oh, I like this game, I've already shaped my life. I'm going to shape it even bigger and even better. And then you find yourself going for crazy things like become. the best poker player of all time, writing New York Times bestsellers, you know, writing more New York

Times bestsellers. And, you know, and now I'm to the point where I'm convinced that positivity, that book, I'm convinced I'm going to help millions of people think bigger and do more with their lives. This has been great. I really appreciate your time. And you've been very open about a lot of things, which I think is really admirable and a lot of fun. So thanks so much, Phil. Appreciate it. We're shaking hands. Yes, we are. Folks at home. For those at home, we're shaking hands. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. All right. I told you there was a ton of practicals in this. Jason, what did you think of this, man? This is a dozy, long episode. I really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoyed it. This is one of the ones where I wish I could have been there with you in person because, hey, Phil's house sounds awesome.

And he comes off much nicer than you'd think he would be and much more considerate than you think he would be. The fact that they'd never show him apologizing to the people he berates on TV, you know, just, just to add to the drama, kind of, you know, that kind of bugged me a bit because I'm like, oh, they're just putting this bully persona up there. And he turns out he's a pretty nice guy. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Really warm, really generous with his time. Great big thank you to Phil. His book, by the way, is called Poker Brat. We'll link that up in the show notes. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Phil on Twitter. That will be linked up. All his social media will be found at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast along with those worksheets.

So if you want to apply everything you heard from Phil, make sure you grab those also in the show notes. Tweet at me your number one takeaway from Phil. I'm at Jordan Harbinger, both on Twitter and Instagram. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes by Robert Fogarty. Booking, Back Office, and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Don't forget to pay that fee and share the show with those you love and even those you don't.

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