When I Was A Donk With Brian Rast

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.

Brian Rast grew up in California and attended Stanford University before he dropped out to pursue a career as a poker player. The 33 year old was the star of the 2011 World Series of Poker when he won two bracelets, including the $50,000 Poker Players Championship event, defeating Phil Hellmuth heads-up for the title.

Most recently, Rast won the inaugural $500,000 buy-in Super High Roller Bowl at the Aria Resort & Casino for a huge $7.5 million payday. In total, Rast has won more than $15.8 million in live poker tournaments, which puts him in 11th place on the all-time earnings list.

Here, Rast talks about a mistake he made in a Las Vegas cash game early on in his career.

Back about nine or ten years ago, early on in my career, I was playing $10-$20 no-limit hold’em at the Bellagio. One hand that stands out to me was when I got in 300 big blinds in a single-raised no-limit pot with an eight-high flush draw and a gutshot-straight draw. My opponent, who I think was Ariel Schneller if I’m remembering correctly, ended up having a jack-high flush draw and a gutshotstraight draw, and of course, he won the pot.

That was a real lesson for me about playing drawing hands. You really have to be careful about which hands you decide to go to war with. I was overzealous. I saw what I thought was a big draw in my hand and got tunnel vision. I told myself that he obviously had a value hand and I was going to push him off of it. It never occurred to me that he could have a bigger draw.

I think that happens a lot to new players. They see what they think is a big combo draw and just get it in hoping that their fold equity and number of outs will somehow give them the pot. But they fail to see the spots where they are up against a bigger draw. Now, instead of 12 or more outs, they have three or maybe less.

Now, when I got to war with a drawing hand, I want to make sure I have a hand like the nut flush draw. You just have to take the time and think it through. People don’t just put in a lot of big blinds with nothing very often, so think about your opponent’s range and then decide how you want to proceed. Unadulterated, relentless aggression isn’t always the best approach. ♠