When I Was A Donk With Eric Baldwin

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.

Eric Baldwin broke out on the live tournament scene back in 2009 en route to being named Card Player Player of the Year. Along the way, he won a World Series of Poker bracelet, taking down a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event for $521,991. He also took third in the $10,000 pot-limit hold’em championship event for $259,534 and sealed his POY victory by winning a $1,000 rebuy at the Five Diamond World Poker Classic later that year for $256,660. The next year, the Wisconsin-native earned the largest score of his career by finishing runner-up in the World Poker Tour Five-Star World Poker Classic main event for $1,034,715.

Baldwin is coming off of another great year on the tournament circuit, having won the Wynn Classic last March for $188,450 and the Venetian DeepStack Extravaganza main event in November for $114,585. In total, Baldwin now has more than $5.3 million in live tournament earnings.

Here, Baldwin talks about how getting too aggressive on the money bubble cost him a near-guaranteed tournament cash.

“One memory that sticks out in my mind was when I was playing in a $1,500 event at the 2008 World Series of Poker. This was a big event with one of those huge weekend fields, and we were on the stone money bubble.”

“I had been opening pretty much every hand and getting away with it. People were letting me steal their blinds over and over, and I managed to build my stack up to about twice the average. Only one guy at the table had me covered…. I guess you can see where this is going.”

“I raised from under-the-gun with something ridiculous like 7-4 offsuit, and this guy, the guy with more chips than me, started to count out a three-bet. But the way he did it was a little weird, because he counted out the three-bet, and then changed the amount at the last second to make his raise even bigger.”

“It got back to me, and I somehow leveled myself into thinking that if he had a big hand like aces or kings, he wouldn’t make it bigger, he’d want action. So in my mind, he had a hand that would fold, and I used terrible logic to justify four-bet jamming all-in with 7-4 offsuit. Of course, I got snapped off by pocket aces. The guy had a priceless look on his face when I flopped an open-ended straight draw, but luckily for him I bricked out and he won a giant pot.”

“What made the whole thing even worse was the fact that I was at a table in the back corner of the Amazon room and there were still like 20 to 30 tables of players celebrating making the money between me and the door because the field was so big. I ended up running into Marco Johnson in the hallway, and he kind of twisted the knife because he asked, ‘Hey man, what did you bag?’ (laughing) So I guess you can say I learned some lessons from that one.” ♠