When I Was A Donk: Darryll Fish

In this 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 game.

Darryll Fish is one of the more balanced young players in the game. The pro from South Florida has earned more than $800,000 in live tournament earnings and an additional $900,000 online. The 26-year-old has final tabled four World Poker Tour events and has a bracelet from winning a PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker event.

Here, Fish relieves one of his early mistakes and explains what he learned from it.

“I was playing in the 2008 World Series of Poker Circuit $5,000 main event in New Orleans when I made one of the bigger mistakes in my career. It’s definitely one of those spots that I’d play differently today, now that I’m more comfortable with live poker tournaments.

“Basically, we were deep in the event when Chuck Kelley raised from under the gun. I looked down at pocket queens and decided to just call in position, in an effort to keep the pot small and under-rep my hand.

“The flop came out ten high and he fired in a continuation bet. Again, just trying to be tricky, I called. The turn was another rag card and he checked. Thinking I was way ahead, and not wanting to miss out on any value, I bet and he immediately check shoved all-in.

“Even though I had planned for this to happen, I somehow leveled myself into thinking he was stronger than he was and after a while, I ended up folding.

“He ended up showing me A-10, trying to make me feel better about my fold, not realizing that I actually had the best hand. That’s when it hit me that by under-representing my hand, he had no reason not to think his A-10 wasn’t good. At no point in the hand had I shown any real strength, so the confidence I was picking up on when he moved all-in was real. Basically, I was correct that he thought he had the best hand, but I was incorrect that his hand had me beat.

“You may think that the lesson here is to play your big hands faster, but that’s not the case. The mistake here wasn’t that I decided to trap. My real mistake came when I folded, because I had played it perfectly up until that point. I ended up finishing in 17th place while Chuck went on to make the final table.

“In poker, when you have a plan, you have to stick to it. Not only did I deviate from my plan, but I also cost myself a lot of chips because I allowed doubt to creep in.” ♠