When I Was A Donk With Tyler Kenney

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.

Tyler Kenney is the younger brother of Bryn Kenney, a high-stakes tournament professional, but Tyler has proven to be no slouch in the poker world either. The New York native has nearly $1 million in live tournament earnings and millions more won online.

He has made final tables on both the World Poker Tour and at the World Series of Poker, and in 2009 he won the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) main event for $1,286,400.

Here, Kenney talks about a recent hand he botched.

I don’t have to go back far to find the last time I was a donk. Very recently, I was playing day 2 of the Wynn Poker Classic main event. I had started the day with a pretty good stack and I hovered with that for a while. I had bigger stacks to my right and two shorter stacks to my left, but the players to my left were tough players.

So finally it folds to me in the hijack, and I have A-7 offsuit. I have the two good players on my left with under 15 big blinds, so it’s kind of a tough spot to steal, but I go for it anyway and raise to 3,500. The small blind, however, who is a bigger stack, calls.

The flop comes K-Q-2 and he checks. I make a continuation bet of 3,500 and he calls. The turn is an ace, and he checks. I don’t want to bet, because I want him to think the ace was a bad card for me, so I check behind.

The river is a seven, giving me two pair. He checks, and I bet 10,000, which is about two-thirds of the pot, and he check raises me to 30,000. So I start going through the hands and I rule out A-K and A-Q because he would’ve three-bet me preflop. I didn’t think he could have J-10, because I don’t often see someone check-raise the river for value after the turn goes check, check. Usually, any monster hands would bet the river after the turn gets checked back.

If I don’t hit that river, I check behind and get to showdown. This time, I called his check-raise, and he showed me J-10 for the straight. In hindsight, that was pretty much the only hand he could have, but I somehow convinced myself that he was turning something like A-J or A-10 into a bluff. I paid the price because I didn’t take the time to clearly think things out and I leveled myself into thinking he had a worse hand. Moving forward, I have to understand that some of these amateur players can get pretty tricky. ♠