FS1’s Nick Wright Opens Up on High-Stakes Poker, Facing Phil Hellmuth

Nick Wright is best known as the cohost of the popular First Things First sports talk show on FS1, where he has become arguably the most visible national fan of the Chiefs and has pounded the drum on his belief that LeBron James has had a better basketball career than Michael Jordan. He also moonlights as a high-stakes poker player, and his games have been broadcast on the PokerGo network a number of times over the past several years. He spoke to Front Office Sports about how he got into this world, his battles with Phil Hellmuth, and what he thinks about a proposed poker league that would drug-test all participants. 

Front Office Sports: How did you get into this world of high-stakes poker?

Nick Wright: I’ve always been a poker player, since I was 15. I ended up becoming friendly with a guy named Haralabos Voulgaris, who was the world’s best sports bettor for a period of time, then worked with the Mavs, and now owns a Spanish soccer team. 

He saw me tweet something poker-related and he DM’ed me and said he could connect me with the guy who puts together all the televised big games on PokerGo, a guy named Brent Hanks. I reached out to him and he and I are now dear friends. 

My first entrée into it, I did two games of cash games with Poker pros Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth and some others. I also did one day of a $10,000 entry sit-and-go that included the two of them, Bruce Buffer, and some other people. It came down to me and Phil and I beat him. 

In that same period of time, Phil was doing these high-stakes heads-up duels. No one could beat him. He beat Negreanu and Antonio Esfandiari several times in a row each. I then reached out to Brent and was like, “Listen, I just won $50K. It costs that to play Phil. He and I had a good rapport. It would be good TV. Why don’t I challenge him next?”

I did, and I ended up losing. But it was a great six-hour match. He beat me on a higher flush. He unintentionally slow-rolled me in one of the most painful moments of my life, and then graciously took me to dinner afterwards and told me all the mistakes I made.

That kind of put me on the poker map, so to speak, where I’m in the mix.

FOS: What’s your worst beat, and what’s your luckiest win?

I actually think the most painful beat was the flush-over-flush against Hellmuth to lose that high-stakes duel. I had 6–8 of clubs; he had 7–9 of clubs. The reason it was so painful was because I went all in and for 99% of players his hand is an instant snap-call. 

I knew when I went all in that if I got snap-called, then I got coolered and he wins. But when he hesitated—and didn’t just hesitate, but took two minutes—I was convinced I was ahead. So I was sitting there thinking, “Please call. Please call. Please call.”

And then he does, and for a moment, I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to have a huge chip lead. I’m going to win this.” And then he turns his hand over and says 9-high flush and I almost fainted. That’s probably my lowest poker moment.

I would say my luckiest poker moment was when I went down to Houston. There’s a new legal game at this place called Champions Club. Phil was there as well, and we were streaming the games on PokerGo and YouTube.

After the streamed game, there was higher stakes cash game. There was this cowboy there—an actual, real cowboy—who was blind raising every game and playing insane. We’re playing Pot Limit Omaha, which is a little more complicated than hold’em.

I had trip aces and a draw to the nut flush. I had the nuts and a re-draw to the nuts with one card to come. He had been playing crazy and been such good action that I showed him my hand to be like, “Hey man, you should fold.” At this point it was the biggest pot I’ve ever played in my life, almost a six-figure pot. 

He looked at my hand and said, “Eh, I feel like I’m gonna get lucky.” He had a hand where of the 40 hands remaining, just five of them would have given him the winner. The other 35, I win. He called and didn’t win. I won and it was just a gift of an extra tens of thousands of dollars. 

I showed him my hand to try to be nice. He called anyway and I won. That would have been a really painful way for me to lose, but I didn’t lose that one.

FOS: In the news recently, Phil Hellmuth talked about how he wanted more breaks during the World Series of Poker main event and said that he wouldn’t play this year. And the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya proposed a high-stakes poker game with no sunglasses or other face-hiding garments and the requirement that players take drug tests. What were your thoughts on these?

I would bet a substantial amount of money that Phil is bluffing. Phil is going to play the main event. Maybe he’ll register late. I would say the fair odds would be 10-to-1 that he doesn’t play. He’s going to play. 

For Chamath, the no hats and sunglasses part is fine. He suggested what sounds to me like one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. That whole crew of guys that he runs with—he plays in a lot of these games and obviously plays with the biggest stakes of everyone in the world if he wants to because he’s a billionaire—are very, very sharp in one specific space, the tech space, that think they’ve solved every other space in the world. 

I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.

The idea that anyone would sign up for a poker league that is going to drug-test its participants, including drug-testing them for weed, is out of their mind. Nobody’s doing that.