Full Name: Arturs Kurnajevs

Limit: $300 Hyper Turbo

Age: 26

Country: Latvia

Hobbies: Gym, kickboxing, riding street motorcycle, beach volleyball in summer, playing xbox w/ friends

How have you been playing poker professionally? What are your main strengths and weaknesses?

My name is Arturs Kurnajevs. I am 26 years old, from Riga, Latvia.

Hobbies - gym, kickboxing, riding street motorcycle, beach volleyball in summer, playing xbox w/ friends

I've been playing poker professionally for 5 years now. My main strengths are that I don't stop improving and have a good math understanding, and weaknesses are that I can get bored and play worse at the end of long sessions when playing fish only.

How many hours on average do you play poker?

I try to play 6-9 hours a day 6 days a week on average.

Do you have any sample goals? What's your grinding routine?

Yes, my goal is 3-4k games a month.

I start by preparing myself to play my A game. That includes setting goals for what I want to improve in the session, reviewing some regwar games from past days, and reminding myself how to reach good mental state and how to prevent me from tilting. It takes about 20-30 min.

Then I play my session taking short 5-10 min breaks every two hours to stretch my back, make some tea and cheer me up if I feel bored. When playing I look only at PT$ filter how much games I have and don`t see results to not distract myself.

How many hours do you put into self-coaching?

I do quite a bit away from the tables, because I have an urge to improve and am only a 300 reg now, meaning there is room to go forward, so on average I do work on my game alone (plus with few friends) about 10 h a week.

Are those friends from Latvia too?

A few of them are from Latvia - Psychodelicx and San4ouz (though he now lives in Portugal), but most strat talk etc. I do with Russian guys n1fan and Samar4eg.

http://i.imgur.com/BYD07Ak.jpg" style="height:370px; width:557px" /> (dfghnajkafs, psychodelicx, Samar4egs wife (she does not play poker ), Samar4eg, IKSecret)

Do you have a specific sleep schedule?

Yes, I do. I have read much about sleeping, about how to make it as effective as possible, and found that the best for me is to sleep 6 hours. That is 4 sleep cycles and I take a power nap of 20-30 min about an hour before I start a session.

Do you go to sleep and wake the same times?

I try to do that +/- 1 hour. Going out with friends can screw it up for day or two, but when I am working I go to sleep as scheduled.

What time do you usually go to sleep and when do you wake up?

I go to sleep at 5 a.m Latvian time and wake up at 11.30. 20-30 min is what it takes for me to throw out all thoughts from head and start sleeping.

How long have you been doing that 6 hours sleep + nap thing?

Only for about 4 months. Before I tried to sleep 4.5h + 2h later, for about two months, but I did not feel too good using this pattern.

Do you need an alarm clock to wake up as planned?

I do set an alarm clock, but it is quite easy for me to wake up after 6 h sleep. Harder is to not oversleep the power nap, especially after a hard workout in the gym or kickboxing training.

Do you drink any coffee or strong black tea? Could you tell me about your eating habits?

I drink coffee quite rarely. I prefer drinking green tea, or black tea with fruit mixes. Nothing strong.

My eating habits where quite bad all these years I've been playing poker. That is the thing I am improving now. I am a foodie and had a very unhealthy diet. Several times tried to change it as I was quite overweight even with going to the gym and kickboxing training. My max weight was 116 kg, now I am 103 and plan to go for 95 as my goal. About 6 months ago I started to eat better, excluded white bread, unhealthy snacks, sweet drinks and many high fat products from my everyday diet. I have read quite a lot and my gym trainer consulted me a lot, so nowadays I am sticking to a low carb diet, though I am not 100% good at it and have slipped a few times, so I'm still on the path of improvement.

How about alcohol when going out with friends?

I still consume it, but much less than I was before. I prefer beer or wine over strong spirits to not get drunk and ruin my evening plus the next day.

When the last time you had a losing month?

 I have not had a losing month in EV since I started to play professionally, but profit wise I think I had one last year.

Wow!

I have decent EV ROI and combined with average to good volume variance evens out in monthly stretches considering that games versus recreational players are more than vs regulars.

What did you do after finishing school till 5 years ago, when you started playing poker professionally? Have you worked or studied anywhere?

My family was not rich, so I started working at a furniture shop constructing furniture (don`t know how to say it right, we were given packages of furniture parts and bolts, glue, nails etc. so we just needed to compose it all together) while studying in 10th grade every day after school to have some money for myself. I worked there part time for 3 years as constructor, courier on a light commercial vehicle and furniture e-shop administrator, but then crisis came to our country and I lost that job as the firm had bad times dealing with it. At the time I had finished 12th grade and was studying automotive engineering for 2nd year. So I was looking for a new part time job when one of my fellow students told me about poker and free starting 50$ on pokerstrategy.com. Poker seemed very interesting to me and as I was good at math, I decided to give it a try, so I started to learn 10 man SNGs. But dealing with emotions and downswings was the thing I was not good at, so even after reading and learning a ton, I ended up losing money on higher limits after bad sessions, to again rebuild in 1 $ games. When I lost most of my BR for like the 3rd time, I decided to give it up for a few months and concentrate more on studying, as it suffered a bit from my poker learning. Eventually after I had not found another good part time job, I returned to poker with now being more careful with BR management and more dedicated as I did not have much money left. From there I went up, after beating 5$ 10 mans, started playing Double or Nothing tournaments where I reached max limit - 100$ games. All this time I continued studying at university, but I still have not finished it now. I need to write my bachelor's thesis, which would cost me too much now in expectation, because it takes minimum 2-3 months w/o poker to get it done.

As I understand, you don‘t have any problems with tilting now?

I have worked with Jared Tandler's first book quite a bit, so my only problems still are related with concentration issues at the end of a session.

How are you with handling money? Are you a big spender?

I have not been good at growing my wealth outside poker. I have tried to work on few business plans, but it takes a lot of time to build something good, so I decided to concentrate 100% on poker for now and invest some in my friends' businesses.

I am not a big spender, b/c I believe that I will need most of my earnings in the future to make my own business. For me poker income does not seem long term reliable. Many countries with their laws cut players from main pool and taxes are rising, so you have to be prepared for the worst.

What is the most expensive thing you have bought?

I have one semi-expensive watch - Omega Speedmaster Alaska edition and my motorcycle 2014 Kawasaki Z1000 Special Edition is the most expensive thing I have bought for non business purposes.

http://i.imgur.com/Wpp7V8f.jpg" style="height:533px; width:803px" />