Hold'em is So Boring!
“Hold’em is so boring,” Dmitriy BudnikovDPBudnikov (pictured) told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. So boring, in fact, that a few weeks back, he took third in the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up, an all-Hold’em tournament, and walked away with $47,000. It was just another day at the office for this Russian poker player, who has over $1.4 million in tracked cashes in his PocketFives profile and sits at #27 worldwide in our Online Poker Rankings.
Budnikov played 30 MTTs that Sunday and the Warm-Up was the final one on the docket. “I tried to play aggressively and put pressure on the table when there were about 200 players left,” he told us in an exclusive interview. “But, I became much tighter later and started to play push-fold.”
Along the way, he was dealt pocket aces twice on the button and doubled up each time. On the final table bubble, he drew out on A-9 with A-5, which he dubbed “standard luck for an MTT pro,” and ultimately went out when his A-4 could not outlast K-9 three-handed. PokerStars player surudcame away with $88,000 for the win.
Like many members of the PocketFives community, Budnikov is currently entrenched in the annual PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker(WCOOP), which kicked off on Sunday and runs until September 23. Prior to his Warm-Up score, his maximum buy-in during the WCOOP was likely $200. Now, he plans to add several $500 and $1,000 tournaments to his schedule and, given the makeup of the 2012 WCOOP schedule, he’ll have plenty of events to choose from.
As we said at the top of the article, Hold’em is so boring. For Budnikov and others, games like Stud and Omaha present brand new challenges. He explained, “During this year’s WCOOP, I’ll try Stud, Razz, Eight-Game, and HORSE. Hold’em is so boring. I’ve been practicing non-Hold’em games and have won Stud High-Low, HORSE, and Fixed Limit Hold’em tournaments over the last two months.”
Why does he think Hold’em is so boring, then, especially when he made the final table of the Sunday Warm-Up last month and banked nearly $50,000? “Hold’em is full of theory. Everyone knows how to play it. Other games are a lot of fun. The most difficult non-Hold’em game for me to learn has been Omaha. It’s nothing special rules-wise, but I can’t play it. I can’t stand when the best hand against the worst hand is only like a 60% favorite. It’s absolutely random.”
Our interviewee is from Krasnoyarsk, Russia. We asked him for the scoop on how poker is viewed in his homeland: “There are a lot of young people who play online. There are also a lot of big games close to me, but I haven’t tried to play any. Five years ago, when I was a student, we started playing Five-Card Draw for cigarettes. It was funny because I didn’t even smoke, but still won a lot. Then, one of my friends told me about online poker and I started to play for real money.”
Once he turned to online poker, Budnikov failed to turn a profit for three years, but said he continued playing because “it was my dream to play games and win money. When I play poker like a game, it’s much more interesting for me. When it’s just numbers and screen names, it’s boring, and I can’t do something boring. I just love to play.” You can find him playing under the moniker OhRaisyDaisyon PokerStars.
Budnikov loves to play so much that he has logged about 14,000 MTTs over the last three years, an average of about a dozen a day. Other top-tier scores he’s turned in include a second place finish in the PokerStars $100 Rebuy last November for $43,000 and a runner-up finish two weeks prior in the site’s Bigger $109 for $34,000. He’s the top dog in the Sortable Poker Rankings for Russia.
If you’re from Russia, make sure to check out PocketFives all-new Russia poker community. View the latest live and online cashes from Russian players, forum posts from Russian PocketFivers, and new members who have signed up from your area!
