When I Was A Donk – Craig Varnell

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.

Craig Varnell broke out on the live tournament scene in 2015 when he won the WPT 500 at Aria for $185,800. Later that year, he finished third in a $1,000 online event at the WSOP for another $73,079, and he took down a European Poker Tour side event in Malta for another $85,259.

In 2016, Varnell took third in the WPT Choctaw main event for $306,346 and last year he final tabled the Wynn Spring Classic. This summer, Varnell won his first bracelet in the $565 pot-limit Omaha event, which has earned the nickname “PLOssus,” for its massive field size and small buy-in. Varnell topped a field of 2,419 to earn the title and the $181,790 first-place prize.

Here, Varnell talks about his first experience in the WSOP main event.

“My first summer at the World Series of Poker was just four years ago, in 2015. I had somehow made day 3 of the main event, and I had a lot of chips, over a million. The other big stack at my table, also with more than a million, was Joe McKeehen.”

“We ended up playing this pot where I three-bet him preflop with 9-10 suited. He called and the flop came down 10-3-2 with two clubs. He checked, I bet, he called. The turn was a king. He checked, I bet again, and he called again.”

“Now the river was a club, but it also paired the board. He decided to lead out with a bet, and I then raised huge, overbetting the pot. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. For some reason I was trying to push him off a flush by representing a full house. It didn’t work.”

“He ended up calling me with A 7 for the nut flush, and I lost a big chunk of my stack. I went from having chips and pushing the table around to just trying to survive and make the money. I ended up min-cashing, but it was a completely different tournament after that for me, and obviously he went on to win the whole thing.”

“The play itself wasn’t so terrible. After all, he doesn’t need to have the nut flush there and I’m sure there’s a good part of his range that he would fold. But the timing of the play was pretty terrible. It was the wrong time, against the wrong opponent, and it tilted me out of the tournament.” ♠