When I Was a Donk: Jeff Shulman

In this new series, Card Player asks top pros to rewind back to their humble beginnings and provide insights regarding the mistakes, leaks, and deficiencies that they had to overcome in order to improve their games.

Card Player’s own Jeff Shulman broke out onto the poker tournament scene with his run in the 2000 World Series of Poker Main Event before taking a bad beat from eventual champion Chris Ferguson and busting in seventh place. Nine years later, Shulman was back on poker’s biggest stage and this time he improved upon his finish, exiting in fifth place for a career high $1,953,395. To date, Shulman has racked up over $3.3 million in tournament earnings.

Card Player caught up with Shulman to uncover two of his earliest mistakes and find out what he did to adjust.

“When I first started playing poker, I really didn’t have an understanding of small-ball poker. In fact, it seemed like I was actively seeking out high variance situations to get all of my chips in the middle.

“As far as I was concerned, the bigger the pot, the better. It honestly didn’t matter how big my stack was relative to the blinds, because if I felt I had an edge in the hand, even a slight one, I was willing to risk my stack to take advantage of it.

“Of course, this strategy isn’t that bad when you are playing hundreds of online tournaments each week, but now that I’m limited to just a dozen or so live events each year, it’s important that I take advantage of them. Nowadays, I’m much more conscious of my tournament life and I realize that sometimes it’s okay to pass up a small edge now in order to capitalize on a bigger edge further down the road. There’s always a better spot.

“Another one of my early mistakes involved my need to make hero calls. I’ve always relied on my ability to make reads and pick up tells, but sometimes I took that skill set too far and found myself calling down an opponent who was bluffing me with a slightly better hand.

“There are two ways win a pot, but being the aggressor is much easier than being the caller. I’ve since realized that when I sense weakness and I’m holding a hand like king high, I can put in a raise and more often than not get a hand like ace high to fold.” ♠