Friday, 29th March 2024 06:43
Home / Uncategorized / Time to quit?

If you follow me on PokerStars, you might have noticed that I haven’t been playing Pot-Limit Omaha lately. I moved back to high stakes sit-n-gos!

Why? Let’s go back a few weeks on time…

As you know, I was sharing an office with Katerina and some of the best Poker players in Portugal. Katerina and I were discussing if we should stay at the office or not.

We enjoyed the social aspect, the boost in work efficiency and the separation of work and leisure that we were getting at the office, but we were not getting much couple time since I was doing the 10am-6pm schedule and Kat was doing 2pm-2am schedule (with some breaks). And…that is a serious problem, my friends!

For about a week we spent a lot of time talking about the matter, and whenever I started thinking about what I would do if I got back home, it just didn’t feel right to keep playing PLO…

It took me a bit to understand what I was feeling regarding the path to take but eventually I realized that the format was not very mainstream, and this is an issue for me because part of my job is to produce content and in the future I think that I really want to do more in that regard. Another issue was that what I was learning was not being particularly useful for other formats like tournaments, sit-n-gos, etc, since those are mostly Hold’em events. Sure, the way of thinking and processing information that I was learning by studying PLO can be useful in some situations, but it’s hard to play a game in a decent level without having thought about the ranges and different scenarios before the big matches.

We just couldn’t decide if we were staying at the office or going back home. We tried to write all the pros and cons on paper, assign values to each and be as analytical as possible, but…when it comes to big life decisions it’s not about math, it’s about a bit of logic and a lot about what feels right!

We reached the conclusion that we needed to either leave the office or change the schedule. Katerina couldn’t really move to my schedule, so I only had the two options. Either we moved back home or I switched to her schedule.

Eventually I figured out that I didn’t want to play PLO if I got back home, and I started wondering if I wanted to play it while I was at the office. I realized that I didn’t! It seemed like an option that wasn’t good for the short term or long term, since I don’t make any money in the short term and it isn’t really helping me long term.

I was more towards learning cash NLH, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of going back to the games I played last year. The night shift for sit-n-gos is the optimal playing time and right now I’m going to get one of the premium playing seasons (April + May for the SCOOP). Also it feels more comfortable to go back to something that I already know and something where I have already been successful.

One challenge was that my Supernova Elite status was going to expire at the end of the March unless I got 50k vpps, so I decided that in the nine days I had left in the month to work, I would grind those VPPs even if it meant losing some money, because having the status will make me more money by the end of the year.

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I chose to stay in the office, change to the night shift and move back to the SNGs.

Things have not been easy so far, pretty far away from that actually, they have been quite tough at the sit-n-gos, but it feels right and I think that whenever things feel right we can devote more energy to accomplish ours goals.

Talking about goals…

I only started playing sit-n-gos at the end of March, and I’m getting married this year, so it’s not going to be my usual grinding year. I also started losing a lot, and I think that I got a bit behind on the learning curve, so this means that to accomplish any reasonable goals I will have to be a lot more efficient this year.

I’ve been working with Jared Tendler on a monthly basis, and I think that I will be able to steadily increase my studying and working efficiency as time goes by.

I’m also moving down on stakes for now and will have to work as hard as I can on my game, so that hopefully I can be playing the highest stakes again. I think that I will go for Supernova Elite this year, but for now the goal is really just to maintain the 50k vpps/month minimum to maintain the status and hopefully be able to do the rest of the VPPs towards the end of the year.

Will I reach the magical 1 Million VPPs by the end of the year?

Will I be able to climb back to the high stakes?

I guess that those are the big questions for 2015!

Stay tuned for more!

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Andre Coimbra is a member of Team PokerStars Pro Online

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