Home / Poker News January 2011 / Where will Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke end up?
Where will Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke end up?
Posted by: James Carter. - Tue, 2011-01-04 09:53
The biggest poker news of the waning days of 2010 was about Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth leaving
UB, the site they had represented for years through better and through worse. Hellmuth’s departure didn’t come as much of a surprise, since the online poker community had been speculating in regards to his badge-less appearances, on various poker forums for weeks before the deed was done.
According to both parties (Hellmuth has since discussed the matter in his blog too), the split was an amicable one, the result of a mutual decision.
Barely has the poker community digested the news that new questions reared their heads: where will Hellmuth and Duke go? Who will be stepping in at UB to take their place?
Experts agree that Hellmuth will probably not join a site where he’ll have to settle for a secondary role. Name-wise, he’d certainly be an excellent fit for a poker room of
Full Tilt Poker’s caliber, but Full Tilt already have players like Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan and a whole bunch of “young guns” who belong to the online poker generation. While it’d certainly be a sight for sore eyes to see Hellmuth duke it out with the “kids” at the cash tables, that will probably never happen simply on account of the fact that cash games are not his specialty. Being the tournament player that he is,
PokerStars would be a much more reasonable target for the Poker Brat, but Daniel Negreanu is the top dog there and that would probably not change if Hellmuth were to join.
A much more reasonable destination would be WSOP.com for the Brat. Caesar’s has long been planning to break into online poker in force, and Hellmuth would be an excellent representative for an upstart.
Annie Duke on the other hand, may well end up at Full Tilt, since that’s where her brother Howard plays too.
