When I Was A Donk – Sam Panzica

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.

Sam Panzica broke out on the live tournament scene in 2013 with three World Series of Poker Circuit titles. He added a fourth in 2015, and a year later took down an EPT Dublin event for $417,105. After finishing second in the Florida State Poker Championship in 2015, he returned a year later to win it outright for $117,282.

He followed that up by earning his first World Poker Tour title, banking $354,335 in the bestbet Bounty Scramble. In 2017, he won his second WPT event, pocketing a whopping $1,373,000 in the Bay 101 Shooting Star. Last October, he almost repeated as champion in the bestbet Bounty Scramble, this time earning $210,783 for a runner-up performance. Most recently, he finished fifth in the WPT Tournament of Champions. He now has more than $4.1 million in career live tournament earnings.

Here, Panzica talks about finding the right balance between passive and aggressive play.

“I don’t have the greatest memory for specific hands, but when I first started playing, I can definitely remember playing too tight. I just really didn’t know how to play that well, and I think my adjustment was to just play less hands. I guess I thought that the less hands you played, the less likely you were to get into trouble.”

“I would basically let my stack dwindle down to ten big blinds and then make a move. Of course, it’s tough to make hands, so I would often find myself in these spots where I busted in like 15th place. If you get dealt enough big hands, you can maybe make the money a few times, but you need to be able to do more than that if you want to win.”

“Of course, I also had a period of time where I went the other way. You get a couple big scores and you get a big head. All of a sudden, you are playing too many hands, trying to win every pot.”

“One thing I try to do when I find myself playing like that is just get up and go for a walk. Obviously, you can’t miss that many hands in a tournament, but just a quick walk to re-focus, and get the blood flowing a little bit. It definitely helps.”

“Obviously you want to be the table captain and just run everybody over, but sometimes that’s just not possible depending on your stack size, or your position at the table. You can’t force it, you just have to tighten up and wait for the right spots. It’s those situations where I think it’s most important to take that walk if you need to, and make sure you don’t make a big mistake.” ♠