When I Was A Donk – Jared Hamby

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.

Jared Hamby broke out on the live poker tournament scene in 2007 when he won two preliminary events and cashed in the main event of the WPT Five-Star World Poker Classic for a total of $584,615. He then won another prelim at the Mirage Poker Showdown for another $96,383 and then took second in the WPT Mandalay Bay Poker Championship for $459,080. As a result of his success, Hamby finished eighth in the Card Player Player of the Year race.

After a few down years, Hamby returned with a vengeance in 2013, cashing six times at the World Series of Poker, including a fourth-place finish in the $5,000 no-limit hold’em event for $154,518 and a win in the $1,500 no-limit hold’em event for his first bracelet and the $525,272 first-place prize. Hamby recently finished fourth in the Card Player Poker Tour Wynn main event in March. In total, he has nearly $2.4 million in live tournament earnings.

Here, Hamby talks about his earliest experiences with online poker.

When I first started playing poker, I got into this cycle where I would put money online, run it up, play a big game, and then lose it. I would do this over and over again. It was 2005 and online poker was just starting to get really big. I had been playing locally at a home game in Waco, Texas, and a buddy of mine there who was going to Baylor, told me about online poker.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out how to beat the lower stakes games and I didn’t really have a problem growing my $200 deposits to $5,000 or even $10,000. But once my bankroll got bigger, I couldn’t stop myself from playing in the biggest games they had, which at the time was a $30-$60 limit game. Back then, PartyPoker only had a few tables with these limits and I’d often have to wait hours before I could get in.

I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing, and I’m a little ashamed to admit that it took 10 to 12 times of me losing it all before I realized I just wasn’t good enough for that game. So I decided to crack a book and read up on some poker strategy, including basic things like bankroll management. I joined some online forums and talked to other players, and before long, I was multi-tabling at the smaller stakes that I knew I could consistently win at. From then on, I was much more careful about moving up in limits. ♠