When I Was A Donk With Cord Garcia

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.

This summer, the World Series of Poker shattered the record for the largest field in live tournament history with the $565 buy-in Colossus, a no-limit hold’em event with a massive 22,374 entrants and an $11.187 million prize pool. After nearly a week of action, it was Houston, Texas grinder Cord Garcia who came out on top, earning his first career gold bracelet and the $638,880 first-place prize.

The 25-year-old poker pro also has a WSOP Circuit ring and a win at the Wynn Summer Classic. In total, he has just under $1.1 million in career tournament earnings.

Here, Garcia talks about the first time he was interviewed and how it affected his play.

In 2012 at the River Poker Series main event at the WinStar Casino in Oklahoma, I went into day 3 with a top-five chip stack. There was about $650,000 up top for the winner, so it was a pretty big tournament for me.

As I was coming into the tournament area to find my seat, I was pulled aside by [a poker reporter] for an interview. I agreed to do the interview, but it was literally the first interview I had ever done. I had no experience with anything like that.

It went terribly. I was super nervous and proceeded to freeze up as all of these questions were coming my way. It really rattled me. Right after, I went to my table and proceeded to make a stupid mistake and lose 45 percent of my chips on the first hand I played. I was just so overwhelmed by the situation. It was a big spot for me, and I just didn’t handle it well at all. Luckily, I was able to rebound from that and wound up finishing in seventh place, but I’ll never forget that.

Since then, I’ve had more experience with interviews and have gotten more comfortable with running deep in an event, so I’m not really bothered by the attention or the pressure. In Colossus, I somehow managed to remain calm and that really helped me get through each day and make sure I really thought through each decision. It was really easy to see who in the tournament was comfortable and who was letting the moment get to them. ♠