Lee Watkinson has been a force on the tournament trail for years. He made back-to-back World Poker Tour final tables during Season III, at the Mirage Poker Showdown and Legends of Poker. Watkinson also owns a World Series of Poker gold bracelet and almost $4 million in career winnings. Watkinson has also faired very well in some of the largest tournament poker fields in history. He finished 45th out of 5,600 players in the 2005 WSOP main event, and followed that up with an eighth-place finish at the 2007 main event. Watkinson knows a thing or two about the different stages of a poker tournament, and Card Player caught up with him at the 2008 Borgata Poker Classic to talk poker strategy. He made yet another WPT final table the very next day.
Ryan Lucchesi: What is your mindset coming into the money bubble?
Lee Watkinson: It really depends on the table and my stack. If I have the boss stack at the table and everybody is tight, then I’m really aggressive. If I’ve got a short stack and there are other aggressive players, then I’m going to be really selective about the hands I play.
RL: Would you say that the players seated at your table should have more bearing on your strategy than what stage of the tournament it is?
LW: Yeah, if you’re at the bubble, there might be three players at your table who want to go hyper-aggressive because the bubble's coming. So you definitely want to take that into consideration when you decide about your own aggression.
RL: How important is it to constantly focus on your opponents, develop your reads on them, and the profiles you develop?
LW: I think that’s the key to tournament play. Gauging the temperature of your table; it can change from hand to hand. I think that’s really one of the main keys. Pay attention to your table and the changing dynamics. When players move in and off the table, [or there is] a big pot, there are so many things that can change the dynamics of a table.
RL: Do you think that this is something that Internet players don’t pay attention to as much?
LW: I think that is something that is harder to gauge on the Internet. In the live arena, you can gauge it a lot easier, and so I think that’s something they don’t do as well. I think that might be why you see them build huge stacks and lose them sometimes. They just have their one way of playing and they don’t switch.
RL: Do you think the endgame of a tournament plays more into the hands of an experienced live player?
LW: Yeah, I think it does. Not the very end … but the middle to late part of the tournaments.
RL: What is your strategy for the play-down day into a final table?
LW: I really never come into a day with a strategy. I just sit there and watch the table and formulate my strategy from hand to hand. Because if you formulate a strategy and something changes … like the main event, when I sat down at the [final] table, I had no idea that Jerry Yang was going to play like that … I had no idea that Yang was going to go nuts. You never know when something like that is going to happen, and you have to be ready to adjust.
RL: So, you advocate a reactive poker strategy as opposed to a proactive poker strategy?
LW: Absolutely, you can’t always control the table. That’s the advantage I have over younger players; they have their styles and they stick to it.
RL: How important is it to be able to change up gears at any stage of a poker tournament?
LW: I think it’s the key, gauging your table and changing gears, different medicine for different patients. You can’t play everybody the same; you can’t play the same style all the time. You shouldn’t have style. Some people categorize me as really aggressive, others categorize me as really tight. It all depends on the day you play with me.
