PNIA's King of the Hill Heads-up Tournament is Back with Defending Champ Phil Hellmuth

Poker Night in America's new heads-up championship, King of the Hill draw a lot of attention back in August - in its first run, Hellmuth defeated Doug Polk and Dan "Jungleman" Cates on his way to victory. Now, he'll have a chance to defend his title as the 50K winner-take-all heads-up tourney is coming back in October.

Hellmuth is not running particularly well in the ongoing Poker Masters - he only cashed once for $200K (4th place finish) after playing all 5 events. Luckily for him, he has plenty of great poker successes to reminisce about during "hard times".

Like a very recent one, when he beat two world-famous online heads-up NLHE specialists, Doug Polk and "Jungleman" Cates to claim the total prize pool, $200K and the pride of wearing the King of the Hill Heads-up Championship belt. The defending champ, the "Poker Brat" now has three new challengers, however.

In the new installment of King of the Hill, three - Polk, Cates and Kassela - of the original four contestants will not be back, they are replaced by three other world class poker pros, Olivier Busquet, Shaun Deeb and Parker Talbot. They'll have the chance to take away Hellmuth's heads-up title.

Although, as we mentioned, Polk will not be back at the felt, he will serve as your host during the Poker Night in America event. The one-one-one poker action starts on October 6th and will be streamed live with a 30-minute delay on the PNIA Twitch channel.