When I Was A Donk With Ryan Leng

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.

Ryan Leng has been a consistent Las Vegas grinder in recent years, with improving finishes summer after summer at the World Series of Poker. The Illinois-native came close to a bracelet in 2016 when he finished fourth in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em bounty tournament for $95,857. The next year, he returned to the WSOP and took second in a $1,500 no-limit event for $237,776, and followed up that performance with a deep run in the main event where he banked $176,399 for 41st place.

In 2018, finally broke through for his first bracelet win, taking down the very same $1,500 bounty event he had final tabled two years earlier. This payday was worth $272,504, and he closed out the summer with another final-table appearance in the $1,500 pot-limit Omaha/no-limit hold’em mixed event. Leng is also a standout online player, having won an online WSOP Circuit ring. He now has nearly $1.4 million in live tournament earnings.

Here, Leng talks about a mistake he made recently, in the December 2018 running of the World Poker Tour Five Diamond World Poker Classic at Bellagio.

“So, there was a guy. I had gotten some intel on a fish… actually a couple of weeks prior, and the guy ended up sitting down at my table in the [Five Diamond] main event. He just started open limping a ton of hands from all positions, so I decided to attack.”

“He open limped under-the-gun and I decided to raise with A-9 offsuit. Another rec player called in the middle and the open limper called. The flop came J-6-3. Check. I bet, the guy in the middle called. And the original limper, the guy I was targeting, folded.”

“I felt like the other guy had like sevens, eights, nines, or tens a lot of the time. And I decided on most turns I’m going to fire pretty big. The turn was a brick, like a deuce, and I bet 1.2x pot. He called again.”

“So at this point I just need to give up. I overbet the pot, and he still stuck around. I’m thinking he has like a jack. I’ve still got 35-40 bigs, a great table, and it’s a great tournament with a long structure so I should just chill.”

“But the river was a king. And I just had that thought, that maybe he would fold a jack. So I went for it. He ended up having a jack, and another jack. Three jacks. He just called. I don’t know, I guess he thought maybe I could have kings.”

“The lesson learned is that in a marathon tournament like that with a great structure, it’s fine to go ahead and make some moves, runs some bluffs, but maybe try and base it on how tough your table is… or what you have moving forward in the tournament. Because if I just give up…. Yes, I’m giving up on the massive pot. There’s a lot in the middle. And if I get that bluff through, I have a great stack, but 35-40 bigs at that table with a really long structure was also worth a lot of money.”

“There are always better spots to apply pressure. Maybe it’s a tougher table where I want to take some riskier lines where I feel like I need to. It used to be an issue for me, where I would just go for it all the time. I would decide in my head that I’m going to run a bluff here and no matter what happens, no matter what new information I get on different streets, I would still go for it. I think in general, I’m pretty good at knowing when to shut it down nowadays. Not in that tournament, obviously, but every once in a while, you need to re-learn a lesson.” ♠