It's not as simple as I'm going to make it seem, but it appears that the heart of Matusow's problem is that he does things on impulse that he knows he shouldn't. Before the WSOP final table, he talked about how he had been playing the most steady, solid poker of his life, how he thought he had a good chance if he continued to play the same way so as to grind through the less experienced players, and how he wanted to avoid what Phil Ivey had done the day before when he went out, which was to play and lose a number of large pots.
Then what does Matusow do on the second hand? He goes all-in pre-flop. Hard to blame him since he had KK, but he got excited and deviated from his plan. Ran into AA. Didn't bust out because he had the guy covered, but went from one of the large stacks to one of the small ones, and never really managed to recover. |