In late May, Lionet, whose real name is Bogdan Diaconu (pictured), won the PokerStars Sunday Million for $203,000. No chop took place and Diaconu defeated a final table that had four other PocketFives members at it. He is up to $1.1 million in online MTT scores and told us, “I’m feeling quite good at the moment.” Duh, winning!

A chop was discussed, but failed to come to fruition. Consequently, a $203,000 first place prize was up for grabs, a $53,000 pay jump from second. As he put it, “It was a maximum rush. I was living every hand at a maximum level. I got close last year two times in the Sunday Million when I made the final 20. I was honestly quite scared that it would not happen to me again.”

Diaconu told us he was card dead for the last two tables and entered the final nine with the seventh largest stack. He doubled up when ten players remained with K-Q against 10-10 to build a little momentum.

“The money is definitely awesome,” he said, “but I was quite happy with my game and winnings even before this big, big hit. $200,000 was my plan for the year. I didn’t expect it to happen so fast, which is awesome.”

As we said, he has $1.1 million in winnings in his PocketFives profile, but his largest score besides his Sunday Million win is only around $20,000. He told us he typically plays tournaments up to a $50 buy-in and sneaks into higher ones via satellites. On Sundays, pretty much every tournament up to $200 is fair game, including the Sunday Million, although he won a 2,500 FPP satellite to get in the day he won.

He got into poker after playing with friends and eventually migrated to online games about four years ago. “I started to deposit a few dollars to play cash games for fun,” he said. “One night, I got lucky and won the $3 Rebuy, the one that starts at 3:00pm European Time. It had a $40,000 guarantee and that was pretty much my starting point. I quit my job and started to grind sit and gos up to $4.50 180-Mans and eventually moved to MTTs. My game started getting better and better and I slowly moved up in stakes.”

Diaconu is one of 1,207 PocketFivers who call Romania(pictured) home. The group has amassed over $50 million in online winnings over the years, including $6.4 million in the last three months. We asked how the general public in Romania views poker. His response: “They are a little skeptical, so most of them when they hear about poker think I’m going to bet my house and stuff like that. Even my father was a bit concerned at first, but people are slowly getting used to poker as a profession.”

He played tennis competitively up until he was 18 and now, nine years later, enjoys going out with friends and having an occasional drink. He said, “Poker has been, for quite some time, my main hobby. I don’t see it as a job. I love playing poker.”

Lionet has generated $870,000 in winnings on PokerStars. He is the #7 ranked player in Romania and has a colossal 5,440 in the money finishes online for an average of $214 apiece. In fact, he is one of only 92 PocketFivers to have more than 5,000 scores. He is #192 in the world on PocketFives and reached an all-time high of #173 earlier this year.

The Sunday Million runs weekly on PokerStars, the largest site in the world. If you don’t have a PokerStars account, sign up through the links on PocketFives and get a 100% up to $600 deposit bonus and one free month of PocketFives Training with no signup fee. Click here to create your account.

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