When I Was A Donk: With Kenny Hallaert

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.

Before becoming the Tournament Director for the Unibet Open, Kenney Hallaert was considered one of the top online players in the game, winning more than $3.6 million under the online moniker ‘SpaceyFCB.’

Then in 2016, the 35-year-old Belgian reminded everyone in the poker world that he still had plenty of game when he made the final table of the World Series of Poker main event, finishing in sixth place for a $1,464,258 payday. In total, Hallaert now has more than $2.8 million in live tournament earnings, putting him third on Belgium’s all-time money list behind Pierre Neuville and Davidi Kitai.

Here, Hallaert talks about the importance of being able to shake off bad hands.

When you are a tournament player, like I am, you really need to be able to move onto the next hand quickly. If you take a bad beat, or make a bad play, it’s over, you need to focus on the hand being dealt to you.

With cash game players, they can sit out and take a walk to clear their head, or just go home for the day, but tournament players are forced to keep going as long as they have chips. So that’s why it was important that I was able to get myself back into the right mindset.

You can’t let previous pots negatively affect your future play. When you get to the break, or play is over for the day, then you can bring up those problem hands with your friends and get some opinions on how you played it, but it won’t do you any good to dwell on it during play.

_Also, you need to recognize that a lot of good information can come from those bad pots. The next time that situation comes up, you’ll be more prepared for it. Eventually you see the pattern of mistakes quicker, and you can try and learn from them. _

The good news for me is that I’ve been playing poker since 2004, and I’ve probably played something like 40,000 online tournaments. Plus I run tournaments, so I’ve really seen it all and don’t get very upset or surprised anymore. It makes it much easier to just move on to the next hand. ♠