Last month, Igor Silva (pictured), known on PocketFives as Igor Necreto, took down the PokerStars Sunday Stormfor $29,000. A healthy field of 31,000 entrants turned out and Silva was one of three PocketFivers at the final table. Interestingly, the other two members of PocketFives in the final nine, Zackattak13and UhhMee, are both ranked in the top 100 on our site, so his competition was anything but a cakewalk.

“I’m feeling great,” Silva told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “It was unbelievable winning it. The Storm had such a massive field with 31,000 players and I won it for the biggest prize of my career. A couple friends were at my house in the moment rooting for me and it was fantastic.” He made it to the winner’s circle under the user name Necretoon PokerStars.

As we said, Zackattak13 and UhhMee joined him at the final table of the low-stakes tournament. Both have made it to the top 10 of the PocketFives Rankings in the past and Silva said of their performance, “I searched about every single player that made the final table and had notes about them. I played more against Zackattak13 and saw he didn’t feel any pressure. Most of the hands he won had no showdown. From 27 players left on, we were at the same table most of the time.” Zackattak13 and UhhMee took third and seventh, respectively.

As far as the money goes, Silva plans to put some of it safely away in the bank and wants to get poker coaching with well-known players from Brazil as well. Virtually all of the winnings we have tracked for him come from the Sunday Storm.

As you might have guessed, Silva doesn’t play poker full-time. Instead, he’s studying production engineering at the Federal University of Vicosa.

He has played poker on the side for the last two years and told us, “I got into poker at my farm when my cousin introduced me to it. I am not sure, but I think I was like eight years old. I was very young at the time and kind of forgot about it. I got back into it thanks to my friend Marcao in 2013 when he said he had a friend who was making money online playing a game from his house. It turned out it was poker. We started to play home games often and I started to study the game.”

The Sunday Storm winner from Brazil used to play football with a local team called the Ipatinga Futebol Clube and has always dreamed of becoming a professional football player. However, as he explained, the career wasn’t meant to be: “Things were getting difficult at school and I thought I was not good enough at soccer, so I prioritized studying hard to pass university. So, I am a big fan of soccer and like basketball as well. And I like to watch TV series like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Breaking Bad.'”

Silva is ranked #462 in our Brazil pokercommunity, which has almost 2,200 players with PLB scores. Brazil is #4 worldwide in our Country Poker Rankings with a combined PLB score of its top 20 players of 97,358.

Congrats to Silva on his signature win!

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