When I Was A Donk With Blair Hinkle

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.

Blair Hinkle broke out on the live tournament scene in the summer of 2008, when he won a World Series of Poker event for $507,613. Since then he’s been a consistent performer on the live tournament circuit, racking up more than $4 million in earnings.

Hinkle’s biggest score came in the 2013 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open main event, which he won for $1,745,245. He has also taken down the WSOP Circuit main event at Horseshoe Council Bluff twice, in both 2010 and 2013.

The Kansas City, Missouri native chopped the FTOPS main event in 2011 for $1,162,949, although it took him three years after Black Friday before he finally received his money. In total, Hinkle has won nearly $2 million online.

Here, Hinkle talks about the playing style that could sometimes get him into trouble.

I was too aggressive, at all times. When I first started playing online, if I got deep in a tournament I’d often play a game where I liked to see how many pots I could raise in a row and win. No matter what the cards, I was raising, applying maximum pressure.

When it worked, it really worked. Imagine taking down an entire orbit of blinds and antes late in a tournament. The bigger my stack got, the easier it was to get away with it. Every hand, I would just tell myself to play it like I have pocket aces.

But then people start playing back at you, so you have to play the guessing game. Are they playing back at you because they have a real hand, or are they playing back at you because they are just sick and tired of you stealing their blinds? For whatever reason, it usually worked out for me back then.

In 2008, when I decided to play more live events, I found myself down to the final 13 in the $10,000 WPT L.A. Poker Classic main event. I was the chip leader, with Phil Hellmuth on my right, and Phil Ivey on my left, but I still had that hyper-aggressive strategy.

I get J 9 and Hellmuth raises the cutoff. I call on the button, with what I am now telling myself is pocket aces. Ivey three-bets from the small blind. Hellmuth folds and I decide to four-bet with my “aces.” Of course, I’m a live fish at the time, and I don’t know how to work my poker chips that well, so it takes me way too long to count out the raise.

As soon as the chips go in, Ivey says that he’s all in. I asked for a count, because I never bothered to pay attention to that before. It turns out that Ivey’s all-in is for less than double what I raised, so I have to call, and he has pocket kings.

The flop came eight high with two hearts, and I even turned a gutshot, but I missed. He went on to win the tournament, and I finished in 11th. After that, I realized I had to tone down the aggression a little bit. ♠