When I Was A Donk With Jesse Sylvia

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.

Jesse Sylvia learned how to play poker while he was in high school in Martha’s Vineyard, but it was in college that his passion for the game turned a hobby into a full-time profession.

After moving to Las Vegas and focusing on cash games, Sylvia got his big tournament break at the 2012 World Series of Poker. His runner-up finish to Greg Merson was worth a whopping $5.3 million. Most recently, Sylvia came close to WSOP gold once again when he took third place in a $3,000 no-limit hold’em event for $211,731. In total, the 29-year-old poker pro has almost $6 million in career earnings.

Here, Sylvia talks about his issues controlling tilt when he first turned pro.

I do remember 2010, which was my first full summer in Las Vegas, when I was living with some poker players, including Russell Thomas. I had him look through my database of different hands, and I was surprised when he almost immediately came back with six or seven hands that made no sense to him.

He’s very efficient with his lines, so for him to point that out was really eye opening to me. I had just been spewing in my most tilted moments. It was like he could actually see where in my sessions things started to go wrong and I would get tilted. It was that apparent in the hands.

That was my first time really seeing how poker players were supposed to act. Russell and those guys had a very professional approach. They would only play when they felt good, maybe even after putting in some studying time beforehand. The second they felt tilted, they would stop playing. I thought I was doing that as well, but my definition of tilted was much more extreme than theirs.

But of course it’s not just about knowing when to quit, because in tournaments you can’t quit, you just have to play through the tilt. I knew I was working hard to get better at poker, but I realized that I needed to also work hard at controlling my emotions when I played.

Right now if I’m feeling a little tilted in a cash game, I don’t necessarily have to quit. I can take 20 minutes and go for a walk to clear my head. At the Bellagio where I play, there’s an arcade down one of the hallways next to the ice cream shop, and I’ll often go in there and play the pop-a-shot basketball game. If I’m really tilted, some of my friends and I will go downtown and play $1 blackjack where the dealers are mean to us. For some reason, that takes my mind off of any bad beat that comes up. ♠