When I Was A Donk – Griffin Benger

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.

Before finding poker, Griffin Benger was a top-ranked professional video game player. The Toronto-native and his team even won the 2007 Counter-Strike Championship Gaming Series. But after dipping his toes into online poker, Benger realized that there was a lot more money to be made with his newfound hobby.

Benger was just a bit late to the poker boom, but he made up for lost time by quickly becoming a dominant force online. He reached the no. 1 ranking in 2014, and has amassed more than $6.5 million in online tournament earnings, according to Pocket Fives. In 2016, he made the final table of the World Series of Poker main event, earning $1,250,190 for his seventh-place finish. He now has more than $3 million in live tournament winnings.

Here, Benger recalls an early online cash game hand that taught him a lesson.

“I have one that immediately comes to mind. This was really early on when I had just started playing. It was like $1-$2 cash games on Absolute Poker, around 2008 or so. I was doing pretty well, but back then it was all about just play, play, play and figure it out as you go. There wasn’t a lot of theory yet to prep with.”

“I remember there was a hand where I raised from the button with about 100 big blind effective, with pocket queens. The small blind three-bet me, and I four-bet to what amounted to about 30 percent of my stack.”

“He then shoved, and I remember scaring myself into thinking the worst. In my mind, he had to have aces or kings. What else could it be, right? I mean, who would put in 100 big blinds with less than kings?”

“I ended up folding, and he showed me A-10 offsuit. Which was brutal, because you don’t have to show your cards online. He chose to show it to me.”

“So that was a big lesson for me that day. For some reason I had it in my mind that I needed to ‘raise for information’ or ‘see where I’m at’ when I got those hands. I wasn’t four-betting for value, or to get the stacks in, I was somehow four-betting to see where I at in the hand, and ended up leveling myself into a dumb fold.”

“In those early days I was constantly paranoid that everyone had a big hand. If I had a big pair, and three clubs came on board, I would be scared that somebody made a flush. If I made a straight, I would be scared someone made a full house. Stuff like that. You can’t play those hands conservatively and expect to win in the long run. Sometimes it’s okay to just go with a hand, and if you run into a bigger one, so be it.” ♠