When I Was A Donk – Andy Philachack

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.

Andy “Doc” Philachack has been on the poker tournament scene since the early days of the boom back in 2005. The 41-year-old has managed to amass more than $2.3 million in live tournament earnings in that span, which is even more impressive when you consider the fact that poker is just Philachack’s night job. During the day, he runs his own chiropractic firm in his hometown of Garland, Texas.

Philachack has come close to winning a WSOP gold bracelet three times, finishing second in a 2007 $1,500 no-limit hold’em event, third in a 2011 $1,500 event, and second again in a 2014 $1,000 event. Most recently, he won the 2016 WSOP Circuit main event at Choctaw for $393,188 and his second ring.

Here, Philachack talks about a mistake that happened in a big buy-in tournament.

I know this isn’t from early in my career, but it’s still on my mind. I was playing in a $25,000 buy-in high roller event at Bellagio this summer and made a big mistake. The blinds were 10,000-20,000 and I was sitting on 400,000, or 20 big blinds. There were 12 players left, and only nine would get paid. I was in seventh place, so there were five players with shorter stacks than me.

It folded around to me, and I look at my first card, which was an ace. I didn’t even bother looking at the other card, I just wanted to steal the blinds and give myself a little more room to work. I made it 45,000 and the small blind raised to 90,000. It came back to me, and rather than look at my other card, I just decided to move all in. I figured that if I had looked at my other card, it was going to make me chicken out and I really wanted all that dead money in the pot.

He snap called me with pocket queens, and, of course, I’m holding A-8 offsuit. I didn’t hit and my tournament was over. Looking back, I don’t regret not looking at my cards the first time. But after he three-bets me, I really should have mucked it and grinded it out with 350,000, which still would have put me in decent position to make the money. Instead, I missed out on the $50,000 min-cash and possibly the $600,000 first-place prize.

This tournament was too big and the players were too good to make a mistake like this. I can get away with something like that in a small buy-in event at the World Series of Poker, but in a $25,000 high roller I need to be patient and take my time so that this mistake doesn’t happen again. Then again, if he had three-bet me with a hand like A-10 and my four-bet shove happened to work, then I look like a genius. This time, he happened to have queens and I looked like a donk. ♠