Dario Minieri Poker Strategy

Dario Minieri used to be one of the hottest names in poker. He's known for his extremely entertaining and aggressive playstyle, numerous appearances on televised poker shows, winning a WSOP bracelet at the age of 23 and buying a Porsche Cayman S with 3 million PokerStars frequent player points. Dario was also a solid EPT regular with three different final tables under his belt.

While his start isn't shining as brightly these days and while it could be argued that he didn't really stood the test of time as well as many other notable pros, Dario still managed to accomplish a lot more than most of the other poker players out there and that alone makes his game worth looking into. In this article, we're going to analyze some of the hands from Minieri's past and try to figure out what made his game special. 

"Click It Back" Against Ivey

Even though poker should always be looked at with long run in mind there are few things more impressive than winning even a single hand against Phil Ivey, which coincidentally, is usually also a sign of a long-term poker success given that it’s necessary to have a deep bankroll in order to to play at the same table as Phil.

This particular hand shows exactly how aggressive Dario Minieri was and proves that he knew exactly how to navigate the narrow spots his questionable hand selection was putting him into. The hand started with Dario open raising preflop with 63s, followed by two calls from Ivey with the same hand and Andreas Hoivold with pocket sevens. On the 6sQcAc board, that gave Minieri pair plus flush draw combo, Phil Ivey decided to go with a somewhat uncharacteristic, lazy bluff.

Even though he knew exactly that Dario was capable of raising pre-flop with an extremely wide range of hands and even though he was near enough to the bottom of his own range for this bluff to make sense, Phil also couldn't really represent many strong hands in a single raised pot with Ac on the board blocking a bunch of nut draw combos. This, in turn, allowed the Italian player to respond to Ivey's aggression with a small raise which won him a very nice pot with a somewhat unbalanced cbet/3bet line.

You Can't Lie To A Liar

Another memorable hand from arguably the best season in the history of High Stakes Poker and another example of Minieri's ultra aggressive yet intelligent playstyle. No matter what you think about Gus Hansen's game he took part in epic 4-5bet wars, way before it was cool and besting him in this kind of situation is certainly impressive.

Epic preflop wars usually come down to specific player history and table dynamics - especially in a live poker setting - so we have no choice but to believe that Dario had enough information to make a good decision, but it's hard to argue with the results.

Bet If You Have It, Bet If You Don't

There's a reason why Minieri was a frequent guest on various televised poker shows. While he didn't have the fame of Ivey or the tournament results of Negreanu he sure knew how to play some attractive and aggressive poker. The fifth season of High Stakes Poker was full of players capable of 3betting with a very loose range but 64o that Dario used to re-raise Eli Elezra in the hand linked above was a bit excessive even by Tom Dwan or Gus Hansen standards.

While in this particular scenario Dario managed to flop big, he'd also make the same play with a wide variety of different holdings and the fact that he even had a hand like 64o in his range, made this spot considerably more profitable for him than it would've been for many other, less aggressive players. Dario felt comfortable putting the pedal to the metal but he always remembered to put a seatbelt on.