When I Was A Donk With Maria Ho

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.

Maria Ho is one of the most well-known players in the poker world thanks to her countless television appearances on shows such as The Amazing Race, American Idol, and Anderson Cooper 360 as well as her commentary on the Heartland Poker Tour and Poker Night: The Tour. But she also has the results to back it up, having been the last woman standing in both the 2007 and 2014 World Series of Poker main event.

Ho, who also authored a chapter in Winning Women of Poker: Secret Strategies Revealed, has more than $2.6 million in poker earnings and most recently made the World Poker Tour final table of the Bay 101 Shooting Star, finishing in sixth place for $179,930.

Here, Ho talks about a bad habit she had earlier in her career.

One of my biggest leaks was my tendency to make defensive bets. I would check-call bets on the flop and then lead on the turn as a defensive bet, or what is sometimes called a blocker bet. I would have these medium-strength hands and by betting myself, I could name my own, smaller price.

I often made these bets to find out where I was at because I was really afraid of being put in tough situations. If I checked, for example, they could bet big and really put me to the test. So I would make these smaller bets and if anyone raised me, I could easily fold the hand without losing a lot of my stack.

Of course, the problem with that is that you don’t allow your opponents to bluff, which is often the best way of extracting chips. One time at a WSOP event, I remember making a defensive bet on the river and my opponent raised me. Normally, I would fold, but this time I had a read and made the correct call.

That was when I realized that my defensive bet strategy was being abused by good players, and more importantly, that I could handle being put in a difficult situation. After that, I wasn’t so afraid of facing a big bet, and as a result, I had more confidence in my decision-making ability. ♠