News and Plans for the rest of the year

Hi guys!

Just wanted to make a quick post to let you know about a couple of news. First of all, PokerStars 7 is now out of Beta stage! As of the next client update (probably within this week), PokerStars 7 will be the default software. You can still go back to using PokerStars 6 for now, but eventually all players will have to switch to PS7 so you might as well start adjusting now. Click here if you want to know more about the change. I've played with the new software a bit, and it looks pretty cool! You can find details about what's new here.

Also, there is a cool promotion going on right now. If you make a deposit of $20 or more before November 17th, 23:59 ET using bonus code "SPIN150", you'll receive a reload bonus of up to $150. You'll have to earn VIP Player Points by playing real money games. Each time you earn 100 VPPs, PokerStars will credit your account with $5 of your cash bonus. You have 21 days after making a qualifying deposit to earn all the VPPs you need to release the full bonus. I think this promotion is great for any player, but if you're playing regularly at PokerStars it will be super easy to unlock this one. It's basically free $150!

So, moving on to what I've been up to lately. October is the post-WCOOP month. That means that it wasn't very productive in terms of poker. André and I took one week off to relax and decided to go to Cape Verde. We booked a room in an all-inclusive resort at the island of Boa Vista. It was the perfect thing to recharge batteries after a month of heavy grinding. We just sat by the pool or at the beach, reading books and relaxing. We also spent a good amount of time at the resort's spa.

The beach in front of our resort

I also got a cold in October (big surprise!) so that slowed me down a bit too. I only started grinding again towards the end of the month and took my time to get back into the working rythm. Early in November I reached my first ever milestone, the one at 200k VPPs!

I'm pretty happy about it cause apart from the obvious (getting more money, duh!), this is the year where I've put the biggest volume than ever before. My plan right now is to go for the next milestone which is at 300k VPPs. Considering my current amount of VPPs, I pretty much have to do 50k points in each of the remaining months of the year. That's pretty hard for my standards. To give you an example, the only month this year where I've done 50k VPPs was May, during the SCOOP. The other time I came close (with around 45k VPPs) was in September with the WCOOP. Taking that into consideration, 50k VPPS in a "normal" month should be pretty hard, if not impossible, for me to get. 

The good news is that just like I need the VPPs until the end of the year, there are a lot of other players in the same situation. Maybe not all of them are after a milestone, they could be after Supernova or Supernova Elite but the truth is there's increased traffic at the hypers right now. I'm hoping that this will be the case until the end of December and that I will be able to unlock the next milestone. According to my calculations I need to maintain a pace of 2.5k VPPs per day in order to reach my goal. That means... lots of work until the end of 2014 but hopefully it will pay off!

I'll see you at the tables. Good luck!