When I Was A Donk With Daniel Ott

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.

Daniel Ott has been playing poker for the majority of his life, picking up the game before he was even a teenager. The Altoona, Pennsylvania native was grinding online in relative anonymity before 2017, when he made the final table of the World Series of Poker main event. Incredibly, it was one of the very first big live tournaments that he had ever entered.

The 27-year-old navigated his way through a field of 7,221 entrants in the $10,000 event, eventually finishing runner-up to Scott Blumenstein. He earned $4.7 million for his second-place showing, but despite the massive payout, Ott is in no hurry to jump into the high roller scene. He continues to live in Pennsylvania while making the occasional trip for poker. He cashed three times in the 2018 WSOP.

Here, Ott talks about his very early start in poker and why teenagers don’t always make the best players.

“There were a lot of mistakes in the early days. I mean, I started playing when I was just 12 years old, so you can imagine the kinds of errors I was making back then.”

“I was nitty with my money, which was a good thing, but I was way too tight as a player. I remember having six blinds in a tournament, and being too afraid to go all-in with pocket nines. It was things like that. I was just too afraid to gamble.”

“I also had tilt problems. As a teenager I would blow a lot of money trying to get un-stuck. Players are supposed to move down in stakes when they are losing, but I would move up to try and get it back faster. Obviously, that didn’t always go very well.”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend online poker to any teenagers. It wasn’t until I was about 19 or 20 that I started to really understand the game, and was able to control the tilting. I started watching videos online, and from then on, everything started to click and the game got a little easier.” ♠