Phil Hellmuth has started a fire on social media after saying he doesn’t believe Shaun Deeb should have won the WSOP Player of the Year award this summer and posting a video explaining why.
Hellmuth was gracious enough to say that Deeb won “by the rules listed” before explaining why these rules are actually messed up.
“I don’t think any professional poker player believes that the right person won Player of the Year,” Hellmuth said — before acknowledging that Daniel Negreanu had told him he believed Deeb was a worthy winner.
Hellmuth didn’t hold back: “Bullshit,” Hellmuth said. “Benny Glaser won three bracelets and what Michael Mizrachi did was incredible. He won the Main Event and he won the [Poker] Players Championship. Mizrachi should have been Player of the Year. I think 90% of the poker world believes that. Maybe the other 10% thinks Benny Glaser should have won. One of those two for sure should have won it.”
You can watch his full rant below.
Hellmuth claims Deeb writes PoY rules
Hellmuth escalated his argument further. He claimed that Negreanu and Deeb had helped to write the Player of the Year rules.
“Why the f— does Shaun have any say in this?" Hellmuth said. "Come on, man, what are we doing? He’s writing the rules and he’s winning Player of the Year and no one likes the result? What is happening? This has to change.”
Hellmuth thinks the solution is to focus on the champions and the bracelets. “Second place, second place, third place? That’s bullshit. Player of the Year should be about champions.”
Deeb fired back on X, clearly unhappy with Hellmuth’s hot take. He talked about “misinformation” and that he wanted to set the record straight.
“First off, I had zero involvement in the WSOP changing the POY formula,” Deeb said. “The shift from counting unlimited cashes to capping at 10 wasn’t my call — and it hurt me more than it helped.”
Deeb put a shout-out to Mizrachi and Glaser but said, “PoY isn’t about highlight reels. It’s a points-based system. It rewards steady results across the entire series — not popularity, not narrative. And by that measure, I earned it.”
He ended by saying, “And to Phil? Congrats — on spreading false info.”
Daniel Negreanu responds
To Hellmuth’s credit, he responded within a few hours with a new video saying, “He [Deeb] told me he has zero influence in the Player of the Year format, and for that I owe Shaun an apology. But I still stand by what I said… we need to make some changes [to PoY].”
Negreanu posted a lengthy response in support of Deeb, saying, “No one spent more time to understand the intricacies [of PoY] more deeply than you, and you set out on a 7-week journey prioritizing that one goal, at the cost of personal EV.”
Negreanu and Deeb are the only players to have won the Player of the Year award twice — Negreanu in 2004 and 2013, and Deeb in 2018 and 2025.
Here is a selection of the best reactions from big-name players to an argument that crops up every single year post-WSOP.
While the debate rages on, the WSOP PoY formula — and who gets to shape it — is once again front and center in the poker world.
