It's not a dumb question at all and, by good fortune, you're asking exactly the correct person, since I (Jessica, LVA Web-Content Manager) must humbly confess to being responsible for the title, although I've played poker less than a half-dozen times in my entire life and have nothing against Phil Hellmuth, who was more than gracious when I filmed him on occasion in the past. Here's how it happened.
Back in 2005 (or was it even late 2004?) at the height of the Internet-poker craze, pro player Blair Rodman, who's a long-time friend and running buddy of Anthony Curtis', came up with a great No-limit hold'em tournament-playing strategy to give inexperienced poker players a chance to compete against the big guys. As Hellmuth wrote in the Foreword that he contributed to the book, "The tactics are about putting the pressure on the great players by moving all-in before the flop. In this way, you're forcing them to commit all their chips, which is something that none of the great players ever wants to do. Personally, I will go to great lengths to avoid putting all of my chips at risk in any hand, because when I'm all-in, then it's possible for me to be eliminated."
That's the "Kill Phil" strategy in a nutshell; of course, you really need to read the whole book to understand how and when to employ it. Suffice it to say here that Kill Phil proved to be influential enough that it shifted the way the pros played, resulting in a second edition, revised to finesse the original strategy to deal with its effect.
But we digress: back to the title. It all happened around the dinner table at Anthony Curtis' house. Blair, Anthony, and myself were having a leisurely dinner over a bottle or three of wine, talking about the book and knocking ideas around. At the time, by some coincidence the dominant name in poker was Phil -- Hellmuth, Gordon, Ivey, Laak... Not much has changed. Our conversation turned to the title of the book and what it needed to encapsulate, which was about taking on the biggest players with a fighting chance. "How to Beat Hellmuth, Gordon, Ivey, and Laak at Their Own Game" summed it up, but didn't exactly trip off the tongue. I'm a Tarantino fan and his Kill Bill saga was not long out. Kill Phil just popped into my head, Blair loved it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Blair's already finished in the money at three 2010 WSOP events and made a final table; you can follow him on Twitter at @blairrodman and keep up with all the latest WSOP news at LVAPoker.com.
