Tournament Inflection Points: WSOP Main Event Champion Jonathan Tamayo

It was back in 2008 that Jonathan Tamayo first had a real shot at World Series of Poker gold, finishing runner-up in the $1,500 mixed limit/no-limit hold’em event for $140,000. A great score for the Cornell University graduate from Humble, Texas, which he would top the next summer when he finished 21st in the 2009 main event for $352,000.

But while most poker players never get to run that deep in poker’s biggest tournament, Tamayo has somehow made it a habit. In fact, the very next year, he took 333rd out of the field of more than 7,300. In 2013, he finished 613th. In 2015, he was right in the thick of it yet again, taking 78th out of 6,400 players. He min-cashed twice more, in 641st in 2018 and 1,047th in 2019.

In between, Tamayo found success on the WSOP Circuit, bagging four gold rings including titles at the Palm Beach Kennel Club, Horseshoe Hammond, Harrah’s New Orleans, and the Bicycle Casino. He also scored a win at the Wynn Summer Classic for nearly $240,000 and final tabled the MSPT DeepStack Championship at Venetian for another six-figure score. Tamayo also banked $180,000 this April in his home state for third place in the Texas Poker Open main event.

But 16 years of success was eclipsed with about two weeks of work at this summer’s WSOP when Tamayo topped a record-field of 10,112, winning his first bracelet and $10 million while joining his former roommate Joe McKeehen as a WSOP main event champion.

Card Player caught up with Tamayo to find out just how he navigates his way through a tournament.

Craig Tapscott: What’s your strategy as you approach the money bubble? How does it change and adjust, and how does it take into account your stack size?

Jonathan Tamayo: When you are on a short stack in a big field tournament, you’re just pretty much trying to get to the minimum cash. It also depends to what extent you’re short and how fast the blinds are coming around. That has to play into your strategy overall.

Let’s use the WSOP main event as a large field event for example. Let’s say you have one big blind in the main and are ten away from the money. You’re going to have to win an all-in. There’s no way around it. You can’t fold enough hands without blinding out.

If you have seven or eight big blinds in the main, and you’re ten away, you could probably get in the money. The value of doubling up isn’t that much.

The first bubble is always the biggest; it’s basically an infinite percentage bubble. It’s zero or whatever the minimum cash is, which in this case is $15,000. Most other events at the WSOP were 2x the buy-in, so that’s an even bigger bubble. If you’re a medium stack, you are kind of trapped because doubling doesn’t really increase your equity that much. It’s a disaster to bust.

And if you’re a big stack, you can lean on everybody at the table. That is, within reason. It all depends on how the table is playing. Some players will stand up to you, some will not, and there’s everything in between.

There’s no one catch-all way to approach it. You have to evaluate the players behind you and ahead of you. You have to evaluate how the players in the blinds have been playing preflop against you to this point. Also, think about how they will play post-flop because some players will defend, and some will not. I’ve seen some players that will jam 40 big blinds. You must pay close attention to your table before you reach the money bubble to figure the best way to deal with your opponents.

Craig Tapscott: What are you thinking about as you approach a final table?

Jonathan Tamayo: It used to be nobody cared about the bubble. I remember my first few years playing poker, and people just slammed it. They didn’t care at all about the final-table bubble. Many people 15 years ago acted like they had much more money than they did or didn’t care.

These days, players are more bubble aware. They’re playing a lot more appropriately in these spots around the final table. They aren’t blasting off 50 bigs on a money bubble or a pay jump bubble for eight big blind stacks. And I don’t hear as much about the whole play-to-win mentality as I used to. It’s more about finding out what the best play to make is in any given scenario.

The poker population just gets better over time. We didn’t have as much information 15 years ago. I don’t know what we’ll learn three-to-five years from now. The player pool gets smarter and evolves.

A lot of the information out there now is more easily accessible. It’s no longer just play tight, play good hands, and you get all the money like the first few years of the boom. Now, you have to be able to think through different scenarios and situations. Even bad players will put you in some spots where you must use your brain as you get closer to the final table.

Craig Tapscott: How do you prepare yourself for a heads-up battle?

Jonathan Tamayo: There’s a lot of post-flop play in heads up. You also have to think about how the hand ranges have changed. That’s something that you should also be mentally prepared for as you play down to three-handed, four-handed, five-handed, and six-handed. Ask yourself questions. How did your opponent’s ranges change? Did they adjust to short-handed play? What’s changed?

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of heads-up experience with no-limit hold’em. I haven’t worked a lot on my heads-up game. Most of the poker I’ve played is six to nine-handed. That’s just been my experience thus far.

A lot of the approach in heads-up is to make it up as you go. Once you establish an opponent’s range preflop, you can get close to the correct answers on how to play post-flop. That’s the best you can do. But unless you have specialized at some point in heads-up play, you’re not going to get the correct answer very often.

You have to pay close attention to the little nuances in the flow of the match. Unless you’ve put a lot of studying into heads-up, you’ll hopefully stumble on the correct approach to any given opponent as the match plays out.

Look for a player’s leaks. I have encountered leaks from full-ring cash grinders who dabble in MTTs when they get to heads-up. They tend to play way too tight. If not, they tend to over adjust and three-bet really wide. They could also under three-bet, and just defend everything. It’s very player dependent. The possibilities are endless, and it’s personal to each player.

Putting a player into a particular category regarding heads-up play is tough, as there is so much nuance to everything. I was probably just as green coming into heads-up during the main event as Jordan Griff may have been from my lack of experience.

My team and I did prepare the evening before the three-handed final day of the main event. We did our best to keep it as simple as possible. They were helping me plug possible big leaks I had, and the little stuff is what it is. That was the best chance I would have moving towards shorthanded play: awareness of my bigger leaks, which would most affect my equity.

It’s tough. Your brain starts overloading once you get about three, four, or five things to execute. It becomes counterproductive.

Find Jonathan Tamayo on Twitter/X @driverseati. ♠