Portugal's Henrique Pinho Leaves PokerStars After 5 Years

After five years of sponsorship as a Team PokerStars Pro, Portuguese professional poker player Henrique Pinho’s tenure at the world’s biggest poker room has finally come to an end. Pinho chose to break the news via his Facebook page, stating:
“Good bye Team Pro! It was nice, but it’s over now! It’s my last day as Team Pro on PokerStars. It has been a long ride, and it often made me feel like I was the king of the world. I had five incredible years, and I love almost everything I did.”
Judging by his message, Henrique Pinho may have been content to have kept his long term arrangement with PokerStars going a while longer, especially after posting a photo of a broken television screen with the following comment next to it:
“My son discovered that his father had left Team Pro and in a fit of fury, with his plastic hammer, got to do it.”
Pinho then followed up by a partial explanation translated from Portuguese, stating: “why did pk not renew my contract … The only explanation was the budget reduction..”
During his time as a Team PokerStars Pro, Pinho has apparently enjoyed good success playing tournaments online, and has also enjoyed moderate success at live tournaments, having accumulated $149,057 since his first live cash in 2007. Despite no longer enjoying a sponsorship deal, Pinho says “I love this game always” and says he still intends to continue his career as a professional poker player.
Meanwhile, the delegation of Portuguese players representing PokerStars has now been reduced to just João Nunes, and after the news of Pinho’s departure was announced, Nunes wished him luck for the future, commenting, “I want to thank [Pinho] for the all the amazing moments we spent together.”
PokerStars divides its sponsorship categories up into Team PokerStars Pro, Team Sportstars, and Team Online. Currently Team PokerStars Pro boasts 42 top players, including Daniel Negreanu, Jason Mercier, Liv Boeree, Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier and Vanessa Selbst, as well as several World Series Main Event winners like Chris Moneymaker (2003), Joe Cada (2009), and Jonathan Duhamel (2010).