When I Was A Donk – Sorel Mizzi

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.

Sorel Mizzi was considered to be one of the top online players in the game during the poker boom, winning well over $3 million under the names Imper1um and zangbezan24. The Toronto native made a successful transition to live tournament poker, and has since earned more than $11 million on the circuit.

Mizzi’s biggest score came in 2013 when he took second in the GuangDong Ltd Asia Millions main event for $2,073,868. Most recently, he took fourth in the 2015 $100,000 buy-in PokerStars Caribbean Adventure high roller for $659,400.

Here, Mizzi talks about a couple of mistakes he made while grinding online tournaments.

In 2005, I was playing on PartyPoker. These were the golden days for online poker. Back then, the software had it so that when you clicked on the raise slider bar, it would go to a random, ambiguous number. It wasn’t like today where you click on it, and it jumps up in increments of the bet amount.

In those days, people were raising to three or four times the big blind. I didn’t know any better, so I would just randomly click raise on the slider, and my raise size would be anywhere from two to six blinds.

Despite making this huge blunder, the games were so good that I was still able to win often enough. It actually took a little while before the competition caught up and I realized I was needlessly giving away chips by not caring about my bet sizing.

I also got into a bad habit preflop, where I would always four-bet with air if someone happened to three-bet me very quickly. My rationale was, any time someone raises really quickly, they obviously can’t have a big hand. Obviously that was the case a lot of the time because people back then would raise with top pair just to see where they were at.

Anybody paying attention, however, could easily exploit it. These timing tells were not always reliable and, by 2008, the players got good enough to adjust and I started being shown the nuts more and more. That’s when I started to get away from playing within a pattern. ♠