When I Was a Donk With Anton Wigg

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.

Swedish poker pro Anton Wigg started playing poker with his friends on the soccer team, eventually getting into some freerolls and using his winnings to fund his initial runs online. He began to tear up poker tournaments and cash games, and used his bankroll to play some live events.

In 2010, he was the last man standing form a field of 423 in the European Poker Tour Copenhagen main event, earning a big payday of $670,713. He continued to rack up wins on the EPT in side events, and last year won a WSOP Circuit ring at the Seminole Hard Rock for $111,719. Most recently, he took seventh in the $5,000 Card Player Poker Tour Venetian main event for $78,426. He now has total live tournament earnings of nearly $2.4 million.

Here, Wigg talks about a mental lapse he made deep in the 2012 WSOP main event.

“I can just go back a few years ago to the World Series of Poker main event. This was in 2012, and I had made a somewhat deep run. I was up to 1 million in chips from the starting stack of 30,000, if I remember correctly. I had a mountain of chips at that point in the tournament.”

“I ended up letting my ego get to me, and I started playing way too many hands. This was now day 4, and I had been cruising the first three days. I think I expected day 4 to go the same way, but I ended up completely imploding and busting out.”

“The fatigue got to me, and I started to not be mindful of the decisions I was making. You get tired, and all of a sudden you tell yourself you are going to outplay someone. There was a hand where I called an early position raise from the small blind with 6-8 suited, and got involved in way too big of a pot, with way too little of a hand.”

“That’s the thing about poker, you have to learn from your mistakes. If I can’t be honest with myself, then I won’t get better. This was a spot where I learned that I needed to practice mindfulness, so I could play my best during a very long tournament like the main event. I started meditating, which makes it really easy for me to take a step back in a situation like that, and focus on making the best decision I can.” ♠