When I Was A Donk: With Jared Griener

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.

Jared Griener’s first live tournament cash came back in 2013, and the Huntington Beach, California poker pro has continued to put up results in the years since both in his native Los Angeles and elsewhere on the circuit. In 2014, he took second in a preliminary event at the Legends of Poker, and then in 2015, he made his first World Series of Poker final table, finishing seventh in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event.

He narrowly missed a WSOP Circuit ring at Planet Hollywood, and then last year, he placed third in the World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic main event for $431,340, and eighth in the WPT Legends of Poker main event for another $57,190. In total, Griener has accumulated more than $1.1 million in live tournament earnings.

Here, Griener explains how he plays against wild players who don’t like to fold.

“I’m from Los Angeles, so I play there a lot. L.A. is kind of famous for having a lot of punters, in general. A lot of people who overplay their hands. I guess that’s the kind of thing that you can learn from watching other players.”

“So when I first started learning poker, I fell into some of those same bad habits that I was seeing around me. You know, people who would get dealt A-K and then never fold it regardless of what the flop was. It was just raise, raise, shove. Be aggressive and then complain about your bad luck with A-K when it doesn’t win.”

“It was the attitude of, it doesn’t matter what comes. I’m going to raise this hand, and then bet it, and bet it again. I know I definitely punted off a few tournaments in the beginning with A-K, specifically. There were also a bunch more in similar spots where I would make a decent, but not incredibly strong hand, and then overplay myself out of the tournament.”

“I’d say it took about six months to a year before I was able to really correct that part of my game, but now that I’ve kind of lived through that, I think I’ve gotten really good at playing against that all-or-nothing style of player who refuses to fold. It’s really about patience, waiting to have it. I don’t want to give away too many secrets, but I think the key to doing really well in those tournaments is letting them gift it to you when you do have it. Hero calls are great, but they aren’t always necessary. If you wait long enough, someone will find a way to give you their chips in a really bad spot.” ♠