Phil Hellmuth made his customary late entrance at the 2023 NAPT Main Event, but there was no sign of the Poker Brat (yet). Instead, Hellmuth was all smiles as he started building a stack on Day 1c at Resorts World.
And there was a meta moment when he got into a film-in-film encounter with PokerOrg's Tiffany Michelle. Tiffany was filming Hellmuth, who was filming himself, when he noticed he was being filmed by Tiffany, so he started filming Tiffany. Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out.
"Tiffany!" Hellmuth said. "Hey Tiff, nice to see you! Another great person in person in poker. Tiffany Michelle, love her."
We love you too, Phil.
You can watch the action from both sides—here's Hellmuth's.
And here's the same scene from our patented TiffCam.
It wasn't just Tiffany who was blinded by the light of #POSITIVITY. Hellmuth also filmed from behind the scenes of The Big Game and gave a big shoutout to poker producer Matt Marantz (who was part of the original WSOP broadcasts on ESPN).
Hellmuth through to Day 2
There was more #POSITIVITY to be found back at the NAPT Main Event. It's the first tournament Hellmuth has played in months, but there were no signs of ring rust. He survived Day 1c and will move onto Day 2 with a solid stack of 109,000, or around 36 big blinds.
He'll join the 117 other players who have also bagged through to Day 2 so far, with two more Day 1 flights playing out on Wednesday.
David Dongwoo Ko is the current chip leader with 434,500, or 145 big blinds. Other notable players through include Kyna England (316,000), Landon Tice (300,500), Matt Hunt (269,000), Dan Shak (184,500), Maria Konnikova (183,000), Chris Moorman (166,500), Faraz Jaka (133,000), Nick Schulman (128,000), Matt Affleck (123,000) and David Baker (115,000).
We're expecting a busy day on Wednesday, and we'll bring you a full update ahead of Day 2 on Thursday. Live streaming with Joe Stapleton and James Hartigan starts on Day 3.
