When I Was A Donk – Fatima Moreira de Melo

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.

Fatima Moreira de Melo is a woman of many talents. Born in the Netherlands, de Melo became a star on the Dutch national field hockey team, becoming a world champion at the 2006 Women’s Hockey World Cup. She earned three Olympic medals, including bronze at the 2000 Sydney games, silver at the 2004 Athens games, and finally gold at the 2008 Beijing games.

Her fame landed her gigs on both local and national TV stations and she even managed to find the time to earn a master’s degree in law while also working as a professional singer. To top it all off, she decided to pursue poker as her next career. During her short time playing poker, she’s earned $419,000 in live tournaments.

Here, de Melo talks about the humbling experience of her first big live tournament.

The first real tournament I ever played was the €10,000 buy-in EPT Barcelona. I had just been signed by PokerStars, but I still really didn’t know what I was doing and here I was in this very prestigious tournament. I remember that I didn’t even get the concept of position back then.

Sandra Naujoks, who I knew had won the EPT German Open, came in late and sat down at my table in her very intimidating leather jacket. I ended up losing a big pot to her when I held top pair and she had made a flush.

That was a real eye opener for me. Up until that point, I thought I was actually good at poker. You know, I had played in home games before, so I thought I had it pretty much solved. I went from being at the top in field hockey to back in the baby seat with poker. It was very humbling to realize there were so many more dimensions to poker than I had realized.

After that, I just started playing as much poker as I could, both live and online. I intensified the learning process and spoke to as many players as possible. For three months, it was like every day I was being hit with an oh-my-God moment of realization. When you are on the outside, you just don’t realize the complexity.

I used to play poker for fun, just because I liked games. But very quickly the strategy behind poker took over, and I became obsessed. The mathematical and psychological side of the game appealed to me. Also, as a former athlete, I’m obviously very competitive so it was pretty much required that I continue to improve. ♠