Why sit around for two days playing online poker? Here’s why. In December, ahustla16finished third in an FTOPS Two-Day Event on Full Tilt Poker for a cash windfall of $118,000. Incredibly, the score is the fifth largest we’ve tracked for him, and his five biggest cashes add up to over $1.1 million total. At least two of them are multi-day events, so we thought we’d discuss the benefits of two-day online poker tournaments. Why should you play them?

PocketFives: Awesome job in the FTOPS Two-Day Event. How are you feeling about it?

ahustla16: Thanks. I am feeling pretty good. I wasn’t doing too well online over the past year. It just started picking up recently and then I had this score.

PocketFives: Can you walk us through how the Two-Day Event went overall?

ahustla16: They have great structures, so I usually don’t mind sleeping in a bit and late-regging, which is what I did with this one. It didn’t work out so well my first time around, so I had to reenter. I kept my same seat at the same table, which was great since I really liked it. There were some really aggressive players and I was able to get over double the starting stack pretty early on during my second bullet.

From there, I moved tables and chipped up to about 50,000 from 20,000. I peaked around 130,000 on Day 1 and my attempts to steal and bully around the money bubble didn’t work out so well. I finished the day with 86,000, which was good for around 16/54.

On Day 2, I had a pretty aggressive table, but with 30-minute levels, I was able to adjust and find some good spots to chip up. I remember a pretty crucial point where I was getting blinded down to around 20 big blinds and found a big spot where I close to doubled blind versus blind.

Midway through the final table, I was the chip leader and then lost a crucial all-in pre-flop with A-K against A-J that really set me back. We talked about a chop for a bit three-handed, but one of the guys wanted much more than ICM, so we continued playing. Soon after, I ran A-Q into K-K pre-flop for most of my stack. I hung around for a while before getting it in with 8-8 against A-7 to bust in third place.

PocketFives: What do you think of two-day online tournaments?

ahustla16: I think two-day tournaments are great. So many of the tournaments we have now, even the ones with “good” structures, tend to end up being played really shallow toward the end, which is the most important part of the tournament. Also, instead of having to play 16 hours or more finishing some of these very long tournaments, they allow you to be able to sleep and come back refreshed. I’ve talked with friends about how great an idea it would be if PokerStars ran a monthly $2,000 buy-in two-day tournament; hopefully someone over there is reading this.

PocketFives: How did you get started in poker?

ahustla16: Like a lot of others, I first really learned about the game around when Chris Moneymaker (pictured) won the Main Event. I started playing during high school with friends and we would play a lot of $5 sit and gos. Some time later, I started playing online and had terrible bankroll management and was depositing a lot, but eventually learned to manage it. I had my breakout year in 2009 when I won a WCOOP event.

PocketFives: How big was that WCOOP score for $470,000? What did it do for your poker career and what do you think about it looking back today?

ahustla16: I was backed during that time, but nonetheless it changed everything. I was in my last year of college majoring in architecture. I had been going to classes for about two weeks when that tournament came around. I actually had to meet up with a group of students to work on a project the morning of Day 2.

I knew a lot of people played for a living at that time, but I had mostly played sit and gos part-time up until earlier that year, so my income from poker wasn’t very much. It did help pay for tuition and, up until then, I had planned to finish school and get a job as an architect. After that score, though, I started focusing more on poker than school, began playing a lot more, and just tried to get through the year while playing. About a week after I graduated, I packed my bags for a summer in Las Vegas for the WSOP. I didn’t have a great WSOP, but I knew I wanted to play poker full-time.

PocketFives: What do you do outside of the game?

ahustla16: I think I speak for most players who came up playing online that this question could be answered much differently before Black Friday than it would be now. I love and hate all of the additional traveling we have to do just to play online. It’s great in the sense that we get to live in random cities around the world and, having studied architecture, I enjoy the cities for what they have to offer. I also love photography, so it works out well.

I actually made a time-lapse video of a group of us grinding during WCOOP last year in London with Mohsin chicagocards1Charania, Tommy Miller, Faraz The-ToiletJaka, Will Jaffe, and Athanasios Athanasios 9Polychronopoulos (pictured). You can check it out here.

The downside to all of this is all of the additional costs involved in traveling and the time spent away from home. So, when I’m not playing, I’m usually in Chicago hanging out with friends and family.

FTOPS runs quarterly on Full Tilt Poker. If you don’t already have a Full Tilt account, sign up through PocketFives’ links to get a free $25 in most locations plus one free month of PocketFives Training. Get started here.

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