When I Was A Donk: Darren Elias

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.

Darren Elias spent the early part of his career focusing on online tournaments, racking up over $3 million along with numerous World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) and Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) titles.

In 2011, he began to focus more on live tournaments and has since banked nearly $2.6 million. His most recent accomplishment was winning $843,744 for taking down the World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open main event.

Here, Elias explains that, when he first started playing live tournaments, he was a little intimidated by some of the recognizable faces around the table.

“When I first started playing in some of these bigger buy-in events with some of the more well-known live poker pros, I wasn’t playing my normal game. Looking back, it’s easy to see that I was scared money. I just wasn’t looking to get involved in any pots unless I had a big hand preflop and obviously, that’s not a good way to win poker tournaments.”

“You could give me hands like A-J or small pairs in early position and I would just muck them because I didn’t want to make a mistake, at least not a mistake that others at the table could see. For me, it was all about waiting until I had a big pocket pair or until I flopped a set and could get a bunch of money in postflop.”

“Anytime I did make a big hand, I was looking to play it as fast as possible so that I wouldn’t get beat. I would say that to any pro at the table. I was being extremely obvious about what kind of cards I was holding.”

“Nowadays, I’m constantly looking for other players at the table who might be scared money. It becomes easier to spot near the money bubble when players are stalling, but you can usually see who may have won their way into a tournament with a satellite by seeing how often they take a flop, if they don’t tell you outright.”

“It may sound simple, but the best way to overcome being scared money is for the money, or the buy-in, in this case, to not scare you. That comes with time and experience. Eventually, you become comfortable with the stakes you are playing so that, when the time comes, you can pull the trigger on the most optimal play.” ♠