Mingling with the Maven: A Conversation With Yuval "Yuvee04" Bronshtein
David "The Maven" Chicotsky caught up with Yuval "Yuvee04" Bronshtein recently to talk poker, his grind station, and poker in Israel.
What’s your typical week look like as far as grinding goes?
It’s kind of weird, like, right now I’m really in the mode and I’ve been playing a lot live. When I’m not playing live, I go online and see what kind of high-stakes cash games are going on, and I try to jump into those, and whatever high buy-in tournaments are going on with prize pools that are worth playing for, then I usually play a couple of those everyday. I don’t really have a set schedule; I just kind of wake up whenever and just kind of jump into whatever games I feel like playing.
How many hours a week do you think you play on average?
I’d have to say that I probably play, when I’m in the playing zone, probably six days a week, spending five to ten hours per day playing, so maybe 40 or 50 hours on average when I’m playing a lot. I also go through a lot of periods of time where I just don’t feel like playing and I don’t want to get burnt out and I might not play any poker for a month at a time. I usually do that once or twice a year. Last year I did it before the World Series of Poker. This year I did it after the World Series of Poker Europe. Sometimes, I just feel it’s necessary to do that to not get burnt out by grinding all the time.
What kind of grinding station do you have? What do you play on?
I just have a regular white Macbook, nothing special. It works.
How many tables at a time do you normally play online?
When I’m playing super turbos, I play a lot of super turbo sit-n-gos, super turbo MTTs (I could play maybe like 15 or 20 of those), but when I’m just playing like a regular high-stakes cash game or a couple tournaments I want to focus on, I generally like to keep it maybe to two to four tables.
You mentioned traveling. Where have you traveled and where are your favorite places?
I’ve seen a lot of places just for poker. I’ve been to London. I go there every year for WSOPE. I’ve been to Amsterdam many times. That’s one of my favorite places. I’ve gone there when they’ve had poker tournaments and also went there having nothing to do with poker, just vacationing. I’ve been to Israel many times, I was born there and moved out of there when I was five, but I’ve been back there more than five times since I moved and I like visiting there a lot. Some other places that I’ve been to are Budapest, Bahamas, Mexico, several other places in the Caribbean, Canada, Toronto.
Is there poker in Israel?
There is, but it’s not very prevalent, it’s a small thing there. It’s illegal and they don’t have any casinos or anything like that, so the games there are underground.
Sounds like Texas.
Yeah, old-school Texas, and they don’t have many games, and I imagine the ones they do have aren’t very high stakes, but I don’t really know that much about it.
It’s interesting because there are a lot of Jews in poker, and meanwhile, there’s no poker in Israel.
Yeah, that’s true, and it would be awesome to have it there, and to maybe be a representative to Israeli poker at some point in my career.
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