PROFESSIONAL POKER PLAYER PHIL HELLMUTH ONCE won $56,000 during a round of golf, but one annoyance lingers from that Las Vegas afternoon in 2007 when he and Jeff Friedman, a plus-3 who Hellmuth calls “the best golfing poker player” in the world, teamed up against a multimillionaire vitamin telemarketer named Denny and his professional golf partner. Hellmuth had been told two things about Denny: He’s really rich, and he loves to gamble.
However, Denny could be slippery: He once played Monopoly for real money, lost $1 million and welched. (Having spent the past couple of decades covering high-stakes gambling, not to mention two years playing on a well-funded card-counting team, I’ve gotten to know the world’s best poker players and have had my share of encounters with Denny. During our first meeting, amid a posse of high rollers attending the 2003 Super Bowl, he smoked weed, drank screwdrivers out of a coffee carafe and hustled me at putting into a hotel room’s water glass. Years later, I asked him about the board-game story. He said, with a smirk, “I’m not paying a million dollars on a Monopoly bet.”)
Denny and Hellmuth’s showdown at Bali Hai Golf Club on the Vegas Strip began with $2,000 wagered on each hole. But the guys agreed to gamble with “an invisible doubling cube.” It allowed them to double the stakes before or after an opponent’s shot. The opposition can then take the elevated bet or concede the hole. By the ninth, Hellmuth and Friedman were ahead $12,000. “Denny got angry at his partner for messing up,” Hellmuth recalls. “Suddenly, the guy said he didn’t feel well and had to leave. Denny brought in a fresh pro. Denny must have texted him and told him to show up. It was obviously wrong, but we let it go. I couldn’t imagine him being better than Jeff.” By the last hole, Hellmuth and Friedman were up $24,000. “Denny wanted to play the 18th for $16,000; I told him he would have to give us the cube,” Hellmuth says. “He hit his first ball in the water. I doubled […]
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