When I Was A Donk: Chino Rheem

Chino Rheem is considered to be one of the most creative and aggressive no-limit hold’em players on the circuit today. The young California pro broke out in 2006, finishing second to Allen Cunningham in a $1,000 World Series of Poker rebuy event. In 2008, he finished seventh in the WSOP main event, for a mammoth $1,772,650 score. That amazing year wasn’t over yet for Rheem, as he went on to win the World Poker Tour Doyle Brunson Classic in December, for $1.5 million. All in all, he has earned more than $4.6 million in his tournament career.

Here, Rheem discusses one of his mistakes when he was first learning poker in cash games, and how it cost him a lot of money but provided him with the experience necessary to become one of poker’s elite.

“I was a fish when I was a beginner. When I first started playing live cash games in south Florida, no one was playing no-limit. It was all limit hold’em and stud games. If I had 7-6 on a board of 10-9-X, I always thought the 8 was coming. I always felt that I was going to hit a gutshot in limit hold’em, which is definitely a bad mindset. Back then, I chased everything. If I felt like there were two outs in the deck, I was definitely going to hit it. Every time the outs didn’t come, I would wonder what I was doing, but then I would incorrectly chase a draw again. This was way before I knew anything about pot odds, what draws you should go for, if there is the right number of people in the hand to make it worth it, and so on.

“However, you learn as you go, and that was obviously a long time ago. When I made the transition to playing no-limit hold’em, I became accustomed to tournament poker, and my style developed into a crazy one, where I would try to go for all of the chips. It turned out to be really successful in the tournament format. This made me aware that you don’t have to play crazy in cash games to be successful; you can wait around and be patient. When I played cash games in the beginning, I was very impatient and wanted to get all of the money in, which is something you don’t have to do.

“If you can adjust and learn from your early mistakes, you will be fine. I feel like I was able to adjust, and therefore am able to play both tournaments and cash games these days. You have to realize that you are doing something wrong when you consistently lose in cash games. The process for my improvement was just to lose and learn. I feel that if you don’t have some expert or world-class player to teach you, grinding it out on the felt is really the best way to figure out what is right and wrong — trial and error.” ♠