The bubble of the High Roller recently burst with Marcello Mora falling in 12th place when his couldn’t catch up to his opponents . But we lost another familiar face just before the bubble as well with Felipe Ramos falling in 16th place.

Ramos is a hometown hero of sorts here in Brazil, especially with São Paulo being his hometown.

“This is my hometown, yeah,” Ramos explained. “I was born and raised in the São Paulo area. This is a pretty big city with 20 million people in the city and 40 million people in São Paulo states. It’s fun to see that poker is growing and people are understanding what poker is about. So many people that come here are already poker pros, some others are like part time poker players. And I don’t think that you have this kind of environment anywhere else in the world.”

For Ramos, he’s had to adapt to the fame and change up his game to combat the different ways that players have started to play against him. According to him, he’s had to change his style since acquiring a target on his back.

“Yeah that happens for sure,” he said. “People, they want to play against you. They want to tell friends they beat you in a hand, or that they busted you out from the tournament. And this is actually very fun because you need to adapt. In my position, you need to adapt. So some tables I play pretty pretty tight when I know players are calling me all the way or they are raising me with garbage. But it’s a fun way to play poker and to be seen as a good representative for them.”

Ramos has been out exploring the world, adding different flags to his Hendon Mob profile, but even with the fame he tries to keep up with his fellow countrymen and keeps tabs on them.

“We don’t have many big players in Brazil nowadays, and of course most of the well-known guys we’re all friends with and we keep track since the beginning,” Ramos explained. “Especially some of the guys who started playing poker with us back in the day so it’s easy to keep track. Some others came to the scene when we were already playing so it’s been very nice to follow each other because we’re a big community so usually players travel along and go to play the events together. Even though I spend most of my time traveling outside. It was never my goal but I see on the Hendon Mob like ten flags. In the year 2017, I cashed in 10 different countries.”

That being said Ramos still struggles with being away from home for so often and being so far from his friends. But for him, it’s about more than that. He wants to help grow the game that has provided him with this lifestyle.

“You have to travel a lot to play poker so you hardly ever see your friends or even people you like when you’re on these runs,” he said. “But one of my goals in my career is to try to build the game and bring more players to the game. So I always try to do some nice activities within social media to help people out and to start playing poker or guide them on how to progress in their poker journey. I feel like this is my duty and that’s the beauty of it.”

Ramos’ strategy for the high roller wasn’t to take it slow but approach it with a play to win style. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t make it to the money, but that wasn’t the goal for him.

“I’ll just try to adapt to every player and grind my way to the final table and try to win it,” Ramos said about his strategy. “Basically when you play a lot of tournaments your main strategy is to try to maximize your winnings. So I’ll try to play to win. I’m not gonna try to play to cash or final table or something like this. My goal is to win the event. Winning an event at home is always a good achievement, regardless of the event, but this is such a nice event though.”

The remaining 12 players in the High Roller are now in the money and have locked up a pay day of at least R$5,330 (~$1,720 USD). We’ll be sticking around to give a full update on the Main Event and we will very likely be catching up with Ramos later in the week to check on his progress in the Main Event.

Tags: 888LiveFelipe Ramos