When I Was A Donk With Ryan Riess

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.

Ryan Riess burst onto the live tournament circuit in a big way in 2012, finishing second in a WSOP Circuit main event in Hammond, Indiana for a $239,063 payday, but it wasn’t until the 2013 World Series of Poker main event that the rest of the world took notice.

The Michigan native outlasted a field of 6,352 to win poker’s most coveted title, along with the $8,361,570 first-place prize and a gold WSOP bracelet. Most recently, the 25-year-old won a $2,000 buy-in six-handed no-limit hold’em event at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown for $63,891.

Here, Riess talks about his experience defending his main event title at the 2014 summer series.

On day 2 of the 2014 World Series of Poker main event, I made a mistake where I got involved in a raising war with this guy and I clearly could’ve just taken the more conservative approach and avoided losing so much of my stack.

I was sitting about 80 big blinds deep and so was he. The guy opened with a raise and I three-bet him with Q-10 suited. He four-bet me and I considered calling, but in the end I decided that I could get him off of a ton of his range, whether it was jacks or worse, by five-betting. Instead, he decided to six-bet shove and I had to fold. He ended up having A-K.

It was a little surprising to me that he showed up with A-K. I believed at the time that I could definitely get him to fold a hand like jacks or A-Q, and even possibly A-K. Instead, I ran into a guy who clearly didn’t mind getting a ton of chips all in against me without a huge hand. Obviously, since I had position, I should’ve used that to my advantage and just called the four-bet or even just the initial raise.

What took me a little while to realize is that people just don’t like folding to me anymore. In 2013, nobody knew who I was and I think they gave me a little more credit. Now, it seems like nobody believes me, whether I have a hand or not. I also think that some players just want to say that they beat the champion in a pot and won’t let themselves get run over.

So it was on me to figure out what kind of player I was up against. After winning the main event, I needed to realize that other players saw me differently and that I needed to adjust for that. The good news is that when I am catching cards, I get paid off a lot easier than I used to, just because people don’t like folding. The bad news is that I can kind of be at a slight disadvantage if I’m not catching cards. I don’t necessarily like tightening up my play, but sometimes that’s the right move depending on my opponents. ♠