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• WSOP H.O.R.S.E. on ESPN Starring Phil Hellmuth’s Behavior

ESPN aired the 1st two episodes of six last night of what they are billing as the ‘2007 Players Championship’. You know it is the 2007 WSOP $50,000 buy-in H.O.R.S.E. championship. Your ‘Dead Money’ blogger posted many WSOP articles and gave extensive coverage to the H.O.R.S.E. tournament and its eventual winner Freddy Deeb. This post is just to discuss my disappointment with ESPN and the TV time they give to Phil Hellmuth and his Tableside manner. Yes ESPN talked extensively about the ‘Best All Around Player’, the ‘Pros Championship’ when discussing the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. Tournament. Daniel Negreanu is shown stating ‘Without a doubt it is the most important tournament in the whole world’ and 2004 Main Event Champion Greg Raymer says ‘it is a small elite field of the greatest players in the world’. ESPN says it is time to settle all arguments about who is best and this is the Bracelet all the ‘Big Game’ players want.

But in your ‘Dead Money’ blogger’s humble opinion ESPN got off track of showing the great players playing great poker in all the disciplines. Instead ESPN seemed to focus way too much TV time on the typical Phil Hellmuth horrible Tableside manner.  Thankfully at the end of the second hour Hellmuth was knocked out of the tournament and for those of us that want to watch the rest of the ESPN H.O.R.S.E. coverage we will not have to see, the great in all the Poker Games according to Phil himself, Phil Hellmuth anymore. Here are some of the examples I saw during the first hour last night. Tomorrow I will detail some more examples that happened during the second hour.

• Just 9 minutes into the Coverage of the 1st hour ESPN cuts to Phil as he rips out his ever present ear piece and tears off his sunglasses and he says: ‘oh this idiot’ and then says ‘you are so bad Bruno you don’t even know it, this is your worse game’ then goes on to say ‘its ridiculous how bad they play’.
• 23 minutes after the beginning of the 1st hour of Coverage ESPN goes back to Hellmuth in time to hear him say: ‘Freakin idiot, so bad’ once again talking about Bruno. Phil goes on to say: ‘it is alright, he is going to blow off all the chips anyway, I just hope I am here’ then he says: ‘its so ridiculous’. Then ESPN shows Mike Matusow coming over to commiserate with Hellmuth as Phil goes on to explain how the idiot called him and then beat him. Phil goes on to say: ‘I read him so easily, he got away with one stud pot, he tried to bluff me in stud and he won’t bluff me all day again’. I do give credit to ESPN analyst Norman Chad who says: ‘Ladies and Gentleman Ugly American Hall of Famers Mike the Mouth and the Poker Brat’.
• 35 minutes in and ESPN is back to Hellmuth who starts with many expletives deleted from the broadcast and then says: ‘you people are the worse players on the planet, I swear to God’ and then ‘oh my God are you kidding me, thats four bad beats they put on me’ once again it is Bruno who did the beating.
• For the last time during the 1st episode ESPN shows Hellmuth who is saying to Barry Greenstein: ‘try and run me over now Barry’ and Mike Matusow comes back to the table and Phil tells Mike ‘they just can’t wait to race their money in against me’.

That is all the ESPN viewers could stand and ESPN did not show anymore of the great Phil Hellmuth’s Tableside manner. Check back tomorrow when I detail the even worse behavior that Phil exhibited during the 2nd hour of the broadcast.

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WSOP, WSOP H.O.R.S.E., Phil Hellmuth, Greg Raymer, Daniel Negreanu, Mike Matusow, Freddy Deeb, Barry Greenstein,

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