When I Was A Donk With Max Steinberg

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 games.

With a World Series of Poker gold bracelet and more than $1.9 million in live tournament earnings, Max Steinberg has been one of the rising stars of the live tournament circuit in recent years.

Steinberg, alongside his twin brother Danny, took up the game late in his teens. He grinded low stakes and gained in experience before making a huge score for an amateur, finishing second in a Latin American Poker Tour main event in Costa Rica for nearly $150,000.

Although that runner-up finish paved the way for his future career in the game, Steinberg himself admits that it wasn’t the best-played final table of his career.

“I wouldn’t say that I played badly…but I guess I just didn’t understand the context of certain situations at all. I think that I played the final table way too loosely and just had no idea about the context of waiting for pay jumps. I got myself in situations where I was risking my stack when I had no need to.”

“I started out playing mostly cash, and I don’t know when I started learning about some of the key differences between tournaments and cash games. I came into the final table in the middle of the pack and ended up just getting really lucky, picking up aces against A-K and then I stacked another player with aces as well. I built my stack really big by five-handed play, but then I ended up wasting my stack as we played from five handed down to three handed. As a result I entered heads-up play with a very short stack. Looking back at it now I probably should have just picked my spots better and not just played poker, with no intention of thinking about where I wanted to be with certain players left, waiting for advantageous situations where I could intelligently use my big stack to put pressure on other players who were trying to make the next pay jump.”

“If I could go back and coach myself going into that final table now, I’d just say to be patient and let the other players make mistakes. This was back in 2009, when players had less refined games then many tournament players do now. I would just tell myself to play tight with your big stacks and wait for them to make mistakes and you will be far more likely to make it to the top few spots and have a chance at placing first.” ♠