Super Systems: Hellmuth

The System

	This system gets a PASS

Phil Hellmuth’s intermediate strategy for limit Hold’em, from Play Poker Like the Pros

The Game

$0.50/$1 and $1/$2 limit Hold’em

How we got on

Phil Hellmuth might be one of the best no-limit tournament players in the world, but his recent forays into televised high stakes cash play have been rather less successful. Certain clips on www.youtube.com (search for ‘hellmuth negreanu hsp’) have proved that he’d be better off sticking to what he knows best but we’re here to find out if he’s a better teacher. In his book Play Poker Like the Pros, Hellmuth outlines an extremely simple and solid strategy for low stakes limit Hold’em, which you should be able to play without any prior cash game experience.

For absolute beginners he recommends playing only his Top 10 hands, which are pairs – Sevens through Aces – A-K and A-Q. You play these 10 regardless of your table position or the number of bets it will cost you to get involved. If you go on to flop the best hand, like a set, you should bet as much as you can. If you miss you should bet out or raise to try to represent a hand. If you get called/re-raised you have to use your judgement based on player profiling. Hellmuth outlines basic profiles or ‘animal types’ you can apply to the players at your table to judge how you should play them from the flop onwards.

If you make it through to the river with a Top 10 hand he argues you should nearly always call as you’ll be getting pot odds. To this mix, we added his ‘majority play hands’, which are outlined in his intermediate strategy. These are all other pairs (which you play the same as higher pairs), A-x suited and K-Q (both of which you’re looking to hit on the flop).

Moneybags
Our first experiments with the system proved a mixed bag. With a starting stake of $150, we put $75 each on two $0.50/$1 tables. We waited 20 minutes for our first playable hand – 8-8 – put the obligatory raise in and stole the blinds. Kings arrived a couple of hands later and put us in profit, albeit marginally.

Then it all started going wrong. We lost biggish pots with A-Q against A-10 (two Tens hit the flop) and 9-9 on a 10-J-Q flop, but fared slightly better on the other table when we picked up A-K, K-K and A-A in three consecutive hands. Then disaster struck. Flopping trip Queens, we jammed the pot, only to get called all the way by someone who’d completely missed with his K-8 off-suit but made a runner-runner flush with his Eight. The end of the four-hour session? We were up $15 on one table and down $45 on another.

Undeterred, we headed for slightly higher waters with much better results. At the $1-$2 table, we turned the $120 into $190 in a single four-hour session. Our hands weren’t that much better to start with but our table image was, after winning a couple of pots early on with A-J and A-K suited. This resulted in us winning decent pots with 3-3 on an A-6-10-J board, and 5-5 on a 2-6-Q board.

This aggression combined with a good early start seems key to the system. If you can pick up hands and create a decent table image early on it’s very possible you’ll grind out a small profit. But, unless you do pick up hands, you’ll need to be happy investing a lot of time for a relatively small return.

Result

$150 stake, $190 return The first four hours were a bit of a waste after we lost a huge pot when an idiot hit runner-runner flush. In the end it took around eight hours to grind out a measly $40 profit, although to be fair, if we’d have started on the $1-$2 tables we’d have made $70 in four hours. Still a profit’s a profit.

Lessons Learnt

Limit Hold’em can be an exercise in patience. If you’re playing 10-handed then you need to pick your starting hands carefully. With that in mind Hellmuth’s Top 10 and ‘majority play hands’ will definitely rake in the cash. Saying that, the game’s changed a lot over the past few years and if you’re not picking up monsters you need to open your net wider and start playing more creative hands. In his Advanced section Hellmuth does just this, bringing in suited connectors, blind stealing and re-raising with nothing to force opponents off hands, but you’re going to need to play higher than $1/$2 to get people off the majority of their hands. Aside from teaching you patience, letting you get hours of experience without losing (or winning) much, and giving you the freedom to spend time observing the other players at your table (while you wait for a hand that passes muster), playing the Hellmuth system will teach you one very important lesson – you need to win hands without cards if you want to make a quick profit.