Adam Levy is on his way to Day 3 of the 2017 World Series of Poker

Last September, Adam ‘Roothlus’ Levy tweeted out that he wasn’t going to be grinding anymore – live or online. He was trading in his life as a poker pro for regular job in the growing world of esports. He also gave an indication that he wasn’t going to pass up playing the World Series of Poker Main Event.

Levy took a job with a company that helps promote Rocket League.

“I just kind of reached out to this guy that I’ve known for a long time and I was like ‘whatever you’re doing here it seems kind of awesome’. I had no idea what I was getting into,” said Levy. Rocket League is a video game that combines soccer and car racing.

“Rocket League has only been out for two years. Last week it hit it’s two year anniversary. It’s considered an eSport, it has 200K viewers on Twitch, which is absurd for a game that has only been out for two years,” said Levy. “They don’t have the communities built yet, there hasn’t been time. So I just decided to start throwing events in LA. They’ve gotten like 30 people to come out and play some Rocket League and some of them are the best players in the country, and they’re just playing with people who’ve never played before. So it’s a fun night, it’s been cool.”

Since stepping away from poker though to pursue this job, he’s rediscovered just how much he loves the game itself and that maybe certain aspects of the lifestyle were what wore him down.

“I will say that I’ve taken a lot of steps to no longer be a tournament grinder, but upon taking those steps I have realized that I did enjoy it, I just didn’t enjoy the whole living out of a suitcase, not being able to play online in America thing,” said Levy, who was ranked as high as #5 in the world before Black Friday.

Levy now looks at Black Friday, and the fallout from it for American pros like himself as more than just a contributing factor in why he chose to step away a little bit.

“I feel like I couldn’t play it to the best of my abilities when I still had all these like problems that Black Friday caused internally that I never really dealt with. I feel like there’s a lot of Americans that are probably like that,” said Levy.

A full-time return to the felt is definitely possible for Levy, but for now, the 35-year-old is just happy to be able to pick and choose his spots, including the Main Event.

“I just feel like I just needed to do this for my own life. I was just in poker. There’s a loop that you go through where it’s like ‘oh, the World Series ended’, take like one week off, two weeks and there’s something like Choctaw, and then there’s Seminole, then all of a sudden you’re just back into playing tournaments again and then there’s WCOOP,” said Levy. “You just have to hard stop for a bit and figure things out.”