When I Was A Donk With Matt Jarvis

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.

Matt Jarvis got the attention of the poker world back in 2010, when he made the final table of the World Series of Poker main event and finished eighth for $1,045,738. The Surrey, British Columbia resident then proved he wasn’t a fluke in 2011 by winning his first bracelet in the $5,000 six-handed no-limit hold’em event for $808,538.

Last summer, Jarvis went deep in the main event once again, finishing in 51st place for $137,300. In total, the Canadian poker pro has more than $2.3 million in lifetime live tournament earnings.

Here, Jarvis talks about a close call he had in a tournament at the WSOP.

In 2014, I found myself with the chip lead with 22 players left in the $5,000 six-max event at the World Series of Poker. It’s actually the same event that I won in 2011, and I don’t think that anybody has ever won two big buy-in six-max tournaments, so it was a big spot for me.

Slowly but surely, I kind of passed my chips around the table. I raised, called with fours. I ran into jacks. I three-bet A-9 suited and had to fold to a four-bet. I just bled all of those chips away. I went from the chip leader to out in ninth place. It didn’t even take that long. I went from having 150 big blinds to out in about three hours.

For some reason, I felt like since I was the chip leader, I had to act like the chip leader and try and run these guys over a little. I got too aggressive and impatient, and all of those little misfires added up.

That was my one, real shot at winning my second bracelet. If I could go back and play that tournament as the player I am today, I think I would approach the situation in a completely different way and have a much better result.

When you get deep in a tournament, players start to think about laddering up. So the big stacks play like they are big stacks, and the short stacks play like they are short stacks. They fall into predictable roles, which can be exploitable by anybody paying attention. If people start playing back at you, there’s nothing wrong with sitting back and waiting for a better spot. You don’t have to try and push through a brick wall. ♠