Post-SCOOP Situation

Hello everyone!

We all knew this was coming... The SCOOP is over. On one hand I'm sad, cause the SCOOP is for online poker players what Christmas is to a 5 year old kid. On the other hand, I'm also happy to put it behind me cause the working rhythm was pretty intense. Anyway, I hope you guys took full advantage of this great grinding period and gave a boost to your bankroll!

I don't want to make a SCOOP overview, cause I did a post last week so you have an idea about what my results were up to that point. So today, I'll focus on what happened after my last blog post. I said that I wasn't going to play any SCOOP events, but in the end I did play some of them (including the Main Event - Low). Unfortunately MTTs didn't go well this month and I didn't cash anything so I won't dwell further on that.

VPPs

As you probably remember, this month I'm on a mission to break my VPPs record and I'm aiming for 50k points. Right now I'm at... 36.6k VPPs! It sounds great, I'm more than halfway and I still have two weeks left in the month. However, with the last day of the SCOOP being the day before yesterday, I'm  really not sure what I should expect in terms of traffic from now on. I imagine that there will be less games availabe, but how many... No one can predict. Having that in mind, I tried to push myself a bit more during the SCOOP days. My daily goal was at 2.5k points. From now on I need to do 1.4k VPPs on a daily basis to reach my goal. It is significantly less, but if I'm 3-4 tabling most of the day I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. So again, it comes down to how often I'll be able to 12table. We'll see how it goes.

Supernova

So last Saturday I hit the 100k VPPs mark in the year, which means that my Supernova status was renewed for 2014! This is my third year as a Supernova. The first time, I only reached it in the end of December. The second time, I did it by the end of October. Reaching Supernova in May is definitely an improvement for me! Earlier in the year I thought I'd go for 200k VPPs in 2014. Now... I'm not sure. I have my eyes on the 300k milestone as well. I guess I'll have to decide which way I'm going pretty soon though.

Results

This week wasn't as good as I would have hoped results-wise, but I guess we can't have it all. Then again, it's wasn't a particularly bad week either and with the amount I spent on rake I'd say I'm pretty happy with it.

Everyday Life

I'm not particularly proud of the next subject I'm gonna talk about, but if I'm gonna share with you the glam parts of being a poker pro (like travelling and such), I think it's only fair that I talk about the not-so-glam moments of it. I knew that my everyday schedule would have to be somewhat adjusted this month to fit the SCOOP tournaments and my monthly goal, but I didn't know I'd take it this far.

It started by tossing physical exercise out the window. It takes me half an hour to go to my dance school and another half hour to come back. Add that up with the two hours I spent there, that's 3 hours total! Too much time to spend away from the tables during an afternoon filled with SCOOP action. So dancing was temporarily suspended.

Obviously, I spent a lot more hours in front of the computer than I'm used to. Soon, it pretty much became the whole day. If I play 9 hours in a day, that probably means that I spent the entire day working. I never do more than 2 hour sessions, so that means four breaks. Let's say half an hour break each time and there you have it! Poof, your day is gone!

Also, I started staying up late. Every night I'd stay up a bit later than the previous one. Before you know it, I'm not the one making my schedule. The traffic at the tables is. If there's low traffic at 11.00 am then that's a good time to be sleeping, but if the games are awesome at 2.00 am then that's the time to be grinding. Vampire mode full on!

Since I spent most of my day (or night after a certain point) working, I was too tired to do anything other than watch TV when I wasn't playing. As a result, the household chores got left behind. I know it sounds mundane, but it's actually very important. First, it was delivery food instead of my home cooking. Then, it was the piles of dishes and glasses piling up on the kitchen counter. And then it was the rapidly increasing mountain of laundry. I thought of taking some pictures to show you the state of my apartment during the SCOOP, but then decided against it -too embarrassing. But I think you get the picture.

Nutrition

Last weekend was pretty tragic from a lifestyle point of view. I couldn't possibly wake up before 13.00 which is totally normal for someone who goes to sleep at 6.00 and as a result my meal times were totally messed up. I was entirely focused on getting all the good games and didn't worry so much about what I was eating. I'd just grab something quick from the kitchen whenever I felt hungry and that was it. Around Saturday night I realized that I was drinking carrot juice right after munching on carrots. Weird combo, huh? Also, since my meals were off the hours considered regular in this country, I couldn't order delivery food. On Sunday night it dawned on me that I hadn't had one hot meal during the entire weekend.

Healthy carrot obsession

Don't get this the wrong way, I did eat and I'm not stupid enough to jeopardize my health. I was getting food regularly and kept bottles of water around my computer to stay hydrated. It's just that the type of food I was consuming was either raw vegetables (as a snack or in a salad), yogurts, cheese and ham toasts or one of the soups I had lying around in the fridge at the best case scenario. Things you could prepare in less than 5 minutes and could consume with one hand while the other hand was busy clicking the mouse. Let's just say I was more into survival mode and wasn't really seeking any pleasure out of the food I was eating. The closest I came to eating unhealthy was a small bag of chips after finishing my Sunday grind. And that was just for the sake of eating something more tasty. 

Right now I'm still trying to recover from my not-so-great habits. I think my sleeping schedule will be back to normal as of tomorrow and my eating schedule will follow up soon (I'm having leftover pasta as a snack with my afternoon coffee as I'm writing this so not there yet!). In any case, I still have 14k VPPs to make this month so I can't really afford a long break to recover from the SCOOP frenzy. I took yesterday off and I slept until late this morning, so I feel much better already. I'm not sure if I'm gonna play poker today, but I'm definitely going back to the tables tomorrow. See you there!

Gotta go now, laundry and cooking awaits...