Phil Ivey is generally regarded as the world’s best all-around poker player. So “weakness” isn’t usually a word that’s associated with his game. Nevertheless, Ivey is human just like anybody else and has his poker flaws – however minor they might be.
The 37-year-old actually pointed out what he believes his greatest weakness is during a short interview with ALLIN Mag. When asked about the subject, Ivey stated:
My greatest weakness is that I act too fast on some of my hands. A lot of times, I know what my decisions are pretty quickly, I know what I’m going to do and I’ll just do it instead of like, think about it a little bit. I just act too quick, like I’ll bet too quick or I’ll go to bluff someone too quickly instead of thinking about the situation. Because a lot of times I’ll make a bad decision and realize later ‘Wow, if I would’ve really took my time and thought about this I would’ve made a better decision. You know, but I just reacted because a lot of my game is just reacting. So you know, that’s one thing I have to work on is taking my time a little bit more.
When pressed for advice on how you get better at being patient, Ivey added, “You just practice it, you just take your time in key decisions. You think you know what to do, and you say ‘Well I’m gonna take another 40 second to just really think about the decision.”
I think that most poker players would be quite lucky to have their biggest problem be acting too fast. The majority of amateurs spend forever tanking, only to make a bad decision in the end anyways. So for Ivey to complain of acting overly quick, this seems like an easy leak to fix.
It’s probably hard for Ivey to find ways to improve his game since he’s already accomplished so much. Ivey has won 9 WSOP gold bracelets, $17,669,367 in tournament winnings, and almost $17 million in online poker. Of course, his recent online results could be better since he’s lost about $2.7 million in the last year. So maybe this is where the fast-acting leak is occurring the most.
Tags: Online Poker, Phil Ivey, Phil Ivey poker strategy, Phil Ivey weakness, poker tournament winnings, WSOP gold bracelets