Meet the Sunday Million Host André "acoimbra" Coimbra
We are once again joined by André Coimbra ahead of tomorrow's Sunday Million to talk about life as a professional.
"You can have 10,000 game swings in Hyper Turbos"
PokerStrategy.com: Thanks for joining us again. You are back playing Hyper Turbo Satellites after your year off. What's the toughest thing about them?
André Coimbra: The swings can be very difficult, because there’s a lot of variance involved. Even if you’re a winning player, you could still be up or down after playing as many as 10,000 games.
It usually takes quite a few months to get a reasonable sample and a lot of regular players go crazy with either side of variance.
I never look at EV graphs, I don’t worry about daily swings, and I only check my bankroll to see what stakes I can play. Mostly I just try to focus on improving my game a bit every day so that I can stay ahead of my competition.
PokerStrategy.com: Have they ever caused you to go on insane monkey tilt?
André Coimbra: I never destroyed anything, but I tend to eat a lot of bad food during downswings. At home we have a place where we store all our candy and chocolate so that we don’t get tempted on a regular basis by seeing that stuff. Unfortunately, during some major downswings in the past, I lost control and ate all the chocolate (maybe several kilos) in the house!
PokerStrategy.com: How have you been refamiliarising yourself with the Hyper Turbos?
André Coimbra: Since I started playing the Hyper Turbos again, it’s become about studying the game by myself or with my girlfriend, since there are no books or videos about it, and the really good players don’t give coaching. But, overall, I recommend coaching if you can afford it, since it’s the fastest way of learning.
PokerStrategy.com: What's the hardest thing about being a pro player?
André Coimbra: We are not really taught at school how to be our own boss, instead we are taught how to be employees and rely on other people to take care of us. I try to set some goals that are realistic and just depend on my efforts. Sometimes I really don’t feel like working towards one goal, but since I usually have two to three different ones for the year, I just work towards another one and then I go back to the previous one later.
"I'd be playing Magic: The Gathering if I didn't have poker"
PokerStrategy.com: What's the best thing?
André Coimbra: The ability to turn a small deposit of, say, $100 or $200, into a $100K bankroll in a year or two, is great. Let’s be honest, if I was a software developer in Portugal it would take me years and years to earn $100k.
I also like the freedom of being able to work in (almost) every country in the world. At some point I was able to move to Athens, Greece because I was in love with a Greek girl. If I had a regular job that would be a lot more complicated, maybe even impossible.
The worst part is really the other side of freedom, that is responsibility, since I have to manage more aspects of my life than most people, but I like it, so I can’t complain!
PokerStrategy.com: What was it like explaining your career choice to friends and loved ones?
André Coimbra: After I finished my degree I decided to try to play poker full time for a year. I explained that it was something I really wanted to do, since I thought I could make a lot of money playing poker. No one really questioned my choice since I was good at programming and with my degree in Computer Science I could probably get a job easily if things didn’t work out.
Nowadays everyone is happy with my choice and my grandmother actually collects all the newspapers/magazines that write about me to show to her friends at the hairdresser, and tea parties, and so on.
PokerStrategy.com: What would you be doing now if you didn't have poker?
André Coimbra: I think that I would either be playing Magic: The Gathering for a living or working as a software developer. On the one hand I love games and MTG is super interesting, but on the other hand, I also used to enjoy programming and money is better there. I guess that Poker just combines the best of both worlds.
PokerStrategy.com: Thanks André, good luck hosting the Sunday Million tomorrow.
Play the Sunday Million tomorrow.
André Coimbra is hosting one of the Sunday Million this weekend on 
PokerStars at 14:30 ET.
As part of his hosting duties he will have a $215 bounty on his head and will be helping the final table arrange any deals they may want to make.
It is the biggest regular weekly tournament in the world and has a $215 buy-in and a $1 million guarantee.
You can win your ticket for as little as $1 in regular satellites around the clock at PokerStars.
PokerStrategy.com members have won the last two Sunday Millions, will you make it three out of three?
See more of our recent interviews with the biggest names in poker
 Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2. He has been working in the poker industry for nine years and in 2013 won the APAT Award for Best Poker Media Provider. You can learn more about his work here.
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