When I Was A Donk With Upeshka De Silva

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.

Upeshka De Silva broke out on the live tournament circuit in 2013 and has since banked nearly $2 million in earnings. The poker pro from Sri Lanka won his first World Series of Poker bracelet in 2015, taking down a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event for $424,577.

He followed that up by making the final table of the World Poker Tour Legends of Poker main event in 2016 for $198,720, and then won his second WSOP bracelet in 2017 in a $3,000 shootout event worth $229,923.

Here, De Silva talks about his how ego affected his results.

I was a donk last week to be honest. (laughing) But when I first got into poker, I was like 17 years old, and I had trouble with my ego. I would go play $1-$2 cash games, taking just a couple hundred dollars with me, and run it up to like $1,500.

The games were good, so it wasn’t unheard of to win like that. But my problem was that it was never enough to just book a great win, I had to be the best. One of the biggest reasons why someone is a donk is because they care about how good others think they are, and I definitely went through that.

So I would always just take my winnings and challenge the best person in the game to play me heads-up. I’d almost always lose, and then I’d almost always go home crying. Most people would learn their lesson after it happened the first time, but I kept doing it until eventually I gave up poker for a while. Fortunately, I met a couple of other online players who brought me back. I found a backer, and I learned the discipline you need to survive in poker.

Of course I can’t say that ego is completely bad for your game. I think you need a little bit of an ego if you want to get to the top, because you need that confidence for your game to really be firing on all cylinders. Ego becomes a problem when it causes you to change your strategy or your game plan. If you start changing things up just to send a message to the guy on your left who is winning every pot, you are probably letting your ego affect your game. ♠