I’ve gone from being $850 up to blown out in two days of tuition from Tabatabai

What would you do if you were offered tuition from one of the most mercurial young players around, and a free bankroll with which to try out their white-knuckle moves? You’d probably bite off the hand that said knuckles belonged to... and your own mother’s nose if you thought it might help!

This kind of offer doesn’t come around every day, so when WSOP Europe runner-up John Tabatabai offered to mentor me as a Badbeat trader, my notice was being pushed towards the editor of this mag faster than a Hellmuth all-in call. My new bankroll is $500 a day and the task ahead is simple: if I win consistently I get more (Badbeat gets 50 percent of my profits); if I lose, my daily limits start shrinking until – worst case scenario – I’m down and out.

But that’s not going to happen... I’m ready to tear the low stakes cash world apart, just as soon as I get a few tasty morsels of advice from my new mentor.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it begins. Instead Tabatabai asks me to start playing unaided so he can see what my game is like. Thankfully I spend my first week grinding out a handsome $863 profit over some 3,000 hands before the WSOPE runner-up has even given me any advice! Surely John will tell me I’m already the complete package and recommend that I hop right into $5/$10 NLHE action where, with his knowledge, I’ll blaze a path through the high stakes tables.

Or not. In our first two sessions together (he watches online while we chat over the phone) Tabatabai accuses me of play ranging from ‘pure lunacy’ to ‘f♣♥♠ing moronic’, as I get more than a little carried away multi-tabling four cash tables, trying to apply his lessons in hyper-aggressive poker.

Fighting talk

Until I spoke to John I was under the impression that I was pretty loose- aggressive, but as it turns out I’d been bringing a pea-shooter to a gun fight. And as I try to crack John’s concept of playing aggressively in position I start dropping buy-ins quicker than Derby leak goals. Tabatabai reads me the riot act: ‘You need to play your hands A LOT STRONGER. NEVER limp. COME IN RAISING. Play more buttons when it’s folded to you... K-9o, A-2, 10-9o. You MAKE HUGE MONEY IN POSITION. Punish the people who call loosely out of the blinds. Do they check-fold every flop? If they hit top pair do they just check-call every street? Do they check- call the flop with any pair and check- fold the turn unless they improve? You can pick that up within the first 20 minutes – and once you know that you can kill them.’

It seems that my transition from successful ABC player with a couple of moves, into a rampaging re-raising machine, isn’t going to be as easy as I first thought. I’ve gone from being $850 up to blown out in two days of tuition from JT. This could be a painful learning curve but I’m hoping these are shock tactics; I’m hoping that Tabatabai is merely picking out my weak points – my paucity of continuation bets and poor bet sizing – and hammering these key concepts in for long-term gain at the expense of short-term loss.

John’s parting shot starts to make sense: ‘Try and put your opponent on a range of hands, not a specific hand, then make your decision. Ask yourself, ‘Do I have fold equity if I shove my draw here? Keep the pressure on your opponents, 90 percent of the time in position if you can. They will crack.’

As I successfully three-barrel A-7o into a Jack-high board I start to see his point. The question is, will it all click before I bust my Badbeat bankroll, or will I be the one cracking and be forced to hang my head in shame?