When I Was A Donk With Chris DeMaci

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.

Chris DeMaci is a poker pro from Stanton, California. The 32-year-old has been playing poker for the last decade and has amassed nearly $1.8 million in career live tournament earnings.

DeMaci has numerous close calls on his resume, having made three final tables at the World Series of Poker, including a runner-up performance in the 2012 $5,000 pot-limit Omaha event for $316,308. His largest score to date was a second-place finish in the North American Poker Tour L.A. main event for $440,000.

Here, DeMaci talks about one of his earliest memories playing in a cash game.

“My mind instantly goes back to 2005 when I was just starting to get into poker and was playing $1-$3 no-limit hold’em at the Hawaiian Gardens Casino in Los Angeles. I can’t remember if I had turned pro yet or if I still had another job, but I definitely remember that this was the time when I had gotten serious about poker and was playing to earn money.”

“This was the first fixed buy-in game in the United States, meaning you could only buy in for $100. Obviously, because we were all only 33 big blinds deep, the game was pretty wild. Once the games got going, it wasn’t surprising to see $3,000 on the table because of all the rebuys.”

“There was one hand in particular that really changed the way I look at poker. I had K-Q in position and raised. Another player called me from the blinds, and the flop came down something like K-8-7 with two spades. He checked, I bet $9, and then he went all in for $100.”

“I knew my hand was relatively strong, but I ended up folding, assuming I was beat by some random two pair or set or something. After I folded, he showed me a flush draw and it was at that moment that it first occurred to me that someone could go all in without having a made hand.”

“I know that seems like common sense, but I really didn’t understand at the time how powerful a play like that was. For the first time, I was forced to think about hand ranges. I went home and did the math. If he had a flush draw he was 35 percent to win, if he had a worse king, he was drawing nearly dead, and so on.”

“It was a trigger event in my mind. I remember sitting at the table, stunned, but knowing that I had learned something very valuable. I’ve probably had about 10 moments like that in my career, each obviously more complex than the last, but that was the first one and kind of opened up the possibilities of poker for me.” ♠