When I Was A Donk – Matt Stout

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.

Matt Stout has been a constant in the poker tournament scene since 2006. In addition to the $3.6 million he has earned online, Stout has also done quite well in the live arena, racking up another $3 million in winnings.

The New Jersey native with the gregarious personality has multiple World Series of Poker and World Poker Tour final tables on his resume, including a runner-up finish in a $3,000 buy-in six-handed no-limit hold’em WSOP event for $313,370 in 2013 and a fifth-place finish in the $3,500 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown for $308,501 in 2014.

Here, Stout talks about his earliest playing style and why it didn’t always work.
“I’ve kind of gone back and forth in my career from being a nit to being a spazz box, and then back to being a nit, but when I first started out, my standard line was to barrel every single street as long as I wasn’t raised.”

“I was the most trappable poker player on Earth. I look back at some of my old online hand histories and it’s incredible how often I was just being absolutely reckless by betting or raising every street, regardless of my hole cards, the number of players in the hand, or the board texture. It didn’t matter if I had air or monster hands or some sort of thin value.”

“At the time, this was a pretty effective strategy, even though it was reckless. People weren’t three-betting light as often and people weren’t turning their hands into bluff catchers as often. So, to some extent, it was a profitable way to play poker. I was getting other players to fold so often simply because they weren’t used to seeing someone fire more than a continuation bet without a hand.”

“The problem was that people eventually adjusted. They started to exploit not only me, but all of the other hyper-aggressive players online. All of a sudden, I needed another gear to my game. I needed to occasionally make a hand, or at least slow down long enough that people started to give me some credit every once in a while.”

“Nowadays, I still may fire a second or third barrel, but there are more factors to consider beyond the fact that I’m just trying to get a player to fold. You have to account for the board texture, what your equity is, how many outs you have against their range, what percentage of their range you think you can get them to fold and so on. These decisions are all situational, which is exactly how poker is supposed to be.” ♠