My journey while chasing AOPS Leader board.

Posted by Ashish Ahuja on 2020-04-15 at 7:45 AM

Hello friends, it’s been a while since I’ve updated you guys with my recent activity on and off the felts. Well as you all know we are fighting a common enemy “COVID – 19” and we are in a state of lock down so there ain’t much to discuss about my off felt activity. As a result of this lock down there ain’t much to do so we are doing what we love doing the most, yes playing online poker. Lately, I had given up on grinding the afternoon tournaments and was just focusing on daily flagships. But due to this Lock down all major sites are coming up with their series and have so many new tournaments to their schedule with big guarantees throughout the day. So, I decided to take this as a challenge and let’s grind full schedule of a 10 day online series being hosted on Adda52.

We had a good start to the series as we finished 2nd in “Godfather” daily flagship tournament of the day on the very first day of the series. I was fully pumped up with positivism with a great start to the series and couldn’t wait to play more. We had a crazy Sunday after that where we ended up winning two tournaments on adda that day. We shipped “Big Slick” and “11th hr PLO” that day and rising to top spot in leader board at the end of that day. Seeing myself at the top spot gave me full adrenaline rush to keep going for it.

Next major deep run came on Tuesday when we ended up winning the afternoon major of the day “Falcon” and final tabling the “6 max Holdem” Event same day. Running deep in almost every tournament gave us great confidence to keep marching forward. But as we all know it was a long grind and we had to balance everything out. I started over exerting and putting in way extra effort in to it. I was going crazy behind the leader board that I started neglecting my health completely. We were starting our grind at 1 pm every afternoon and ending our session around 5 in the morning. That’s 16 hours on non stop work everyday. I so badly wanted to stop at that point but I just couldn’t.

Despite everything, we kept putting in max effort we could and the results kept supporting us. Next deep run came on Friday when we finished 4th in “Holdem High Roller”. I remember when I finished the tournament it was 5:20 in the morning and we had to getup in next 6 hours for next day’s grind and we hadn’t hit bed yet. My mind was going crazy and I completely lost it there. That moment I realized that I’m screwing it up big time and neglecting my health and sleep completely. I went to bed at six in the morning and back to grinding within next 6 hours. Although chasing the leader board makes you put in your best effort but one ends up grinding 16-18 hours a day!!!!!!!! I was so over exerted because of the lengthy grinds and was left fully drained off the energy during last two days of series.

Finally, the series ended on sunday and we finished 2nd in leader board as we couldn’t put in our best effort during last 2 days. I know due to lock down there are lots of tournaments available these days and we are tempted to play everything but one should also focus towards their health too. Our body can function only to a extent and making it work for 16-18 hours a day is ruthless. I would request the sites to rather keep a schedule in such a way that the grind shouldn’t increase 12 hours a day so as to not effect the players health. I hope everyone can gain something out of my experience and not get lured in to playing excessive poker during lock down and focus on health too. Until next time.

Adios.