Remember when Michael Jordan retired from the NBA to play minor league baseball? Remember when Steve Perry left the band Journey to pursue a solo gig? Sometimes, a new challenge is just what the doctor ordered.

Rocco ‘RoccoGe’ Palumbo stands at #13 worldwide in the PocketFives Rankings and seems destined to go nowhere but up. “I’ve been on a roller coaster the last two years,” he said. “So, to have some good results here and there matters a lot to me. I’m pretty happy to see I’m consistent enough to put in the volume needed to have huge scores, which are the ones that matter for the rankings, so I’m motivated to keep grinding to move up the rankings while not putting in too much volume like I have been.”

If you’re looking for big scores, Palumbo has them. A $93,000 MiniFTOPS win in 2014. A Super Tuesday victory last November for $88,000. Wins in the PokerStars $109 Rebuy, PokerStars.fr Sunday High Roller, and Full Tilt Super Sized Sunday, just to name a few. And as he said, big scores push players into the upper echelons of the PocketFives Rankings.

Which brings him to 2016. “I’ve always wanted to grind whenever I was in the mood,” he explained. “That’s probably because I came from the much softer fields of the Italian tournaments, where you are basically +EV whatever you do, so you can fire any table you want to. That worked for me for roughly five years.”

As Bob Dylan said, “The times they are a-changin.”

“2016 will be different, though,” said Palumbo. “It will be my first year where I’ll focus less on volume. I’ll try to stay under $100,000 spending online every month, which is around 700 to 800 MTTs for my average buy-in.”

The Italian native also plans to fire up some live MTTs like EPTs and the WSOP in Las Vegas. It’s not like he’s a fish out of water in that department, either, as he won a WSOP bracelet in 2012 in a $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event for almost a half-million dollars and is #12 on Italy’s all-time live money list. Still, the focus will be on quality rather than quantity.

“The year I won my bracelet and the year after that, I grinded live games pretty hard, mainly because I didn’t have access to the dot-com sites and so had to put in volume somehow,” he recalled. “It was all pretty exhausting.”

“I have a family, a seven-year old son who was five at the time, and all that time away from home was really painful, but they did join me every time they had a chance and they know it’s my job since we’ve been together forever. Still, grinding online was way softer mentally and physically. However, despite considering myself an online guy, I cannot think of anything better emotionally then going deep in a live tournament and hopefully winning it.”

Being away from his kid was certainly no easy feat. But, as Palumbo contended, his kid is used to his dad having an unpredictable schedule.

“He grew up without really knowing the difference between a 9-5 job and poker,” Palumbo said. “I always grinded and he always knew that as work. I fired myself from my job when he was born, so he didn’t have a chance to see me having a regular job. Until he was old enough to talk about it, he would have thought poker was a really standard job, which it’s not here in Europe.”

Palumbo hightailed it out of Italy in order to be able to play on the major dot-com sites. His current location: Slovenia, where he has joined a few other Italian ex-pats.

“Everybody lives in the same small city on the border,” he explained of the Slovenian poker scene. “It has a very nice casino where they hold poker tournaments, and being on the border makes it very easy because they speak Italian. Some poker players are in the capital, Ljubljana, which is a very cool city. It’s a mix between Vienna and Prague, although it’s very small. In my new hometown, we have a close-knit community even if we don’t hang together too often.”

With a renewed focus on live events and less of an emphasis on volume, Palumbo could have more time on his hands and plans to put it to good use by getting back into shape.

“I’ve been slacking physically ever since I got into poker,” Palumbo said. “Last year, I got really motivated. I don’t know why, but I went to the gym a lot. I was studying a lot of fitness and nutrition. I should say thanks to All American Dave for inspiring me. I also recently got back into playing video games, which was the love of my life when I was younger, like my nickname suggests.”