When I Was A Donk – Ryan Olisar

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.

Ryan Olisar is a poker pro from Naperville, Illinois, who first gained the attention of the poker world back in 2012 when he finished fourth in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event at the World Series of Poker for $252,379.

Since then, Olisar has made two other WSOP final tables and has wins at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, PokerStars Championship Bahamas, and two titles at the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza. In total, he has more than $1.15 million in career live tournament earnings.

Here, Olisar remembers a mistake he made at his first WSOP final table.

In 2012, after I graduated, I was playing poker but I’m not sure you can say that I was actually a poker pro. I just happened to be spending all of my time playing poker.
I somehow managed to get to the final table of a $1,500 no-limit hold’em re-entry event at the World Series of Poker, which was obviously very exciting for me. We were five- or six-handed and it was basically me and one other guy with a lot of the chips on the table.

I opened from under the gun with A 9 and he three-bet me from the blinds. I would probably just call in position today, but back then I decided to four-bet. He just flat called and the flop comes three rags, only one of my suit.

He checked, and I had to c-bet. Then he check-raised me. I folded, and he showed me a bluff of his own, which was a weaker ace that missed the flop as well. It was one of those spots where I got owned, and knew it immediately.

If I had just flat-called his three-bet then I’m not really putting myself into trouble. Maybe he makes a continuation bet of his own and I float to win the pot on a later street. Or maybe he checks the flop and then just folds to a bet from me. Or maybe I still lose the pot, but it’s a much smaller pot.

I ended up finishing in fourth for about $250,000, but I also learned that when you are playing a big stack in position, you might want to think about controlling the pot size, especially at a final table when there are ICM (Independent Chip Model) considerations. ♠