When I Was A Donk: With Shannon Shorr

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.

Poker pro Shannon Shorr has been a presence on the live tournament scene ever since 2006 when he won the Bellagio Cup for $960,690. Since then, the Alabama native has earned more than $6.2 million on the felt.

Shorr has come close to winning a World Series of Poker bracelet many times, taking second in a 2008 no-limit hold’em event and third in the 2012 $10,000 six-max event. He also narrowly missed out on a few World Poker Tour titles when he finished fifth in the 2009 WPT Championship, fourth in the 2011 WPT Southern Poker Championship and runner-up in the WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open.

Here, Shorr explains why you need to bet with intention.

There’s so many things that I’ve had to work through in my career. Even nowadays, I’m constantly working to improve. If you can’t look back at your game six months ago and see that you sucked, then you’re not going about it the right way.

As far as a specific issue I had in my game, I think that I used to hurt myself by putting chips into the pot without having any intention behind it. It sounds dumb, but you’d be surprised how often it happens.

Let’s say you flop something like middle pair and it gets checked to you, so you throw in a bet. Now, are you betting for value? Are you betting to get a fold? Do you even know what you want to happen? If you can’t answer those questions, then why are you betting at all? You can’t play the game for a living if you are consistently giving away chips like that. Every bet, every call and every raise has to be for a reason.

These days, I’ve tried to make my game as GTO (game theory optimal) as possible. As each situation comes up, I take the time to go through all of my options. Not just whether or not to bet, but how much. Who is my opponent? What are the stack sizes? What is the board texture like? With all of those variables in play, you just can’t throw chips in the middle and hope for the best.

The other positive effect that comes from having this mindset at the table, is that I don’t have to beat myself up anymore after I make a bad play. Early in my career, I would have to deal with my anxiety over the outcome of a hand or tournament, but now, because I know that I made the best decision possible with the information that I had, it’s much easier to move on to the next one. ♠