Last month, Davide girex91Marchi (pictured) hit it big in the PokerStars Sunday Million, finishing second after a three-way chop for a commanding $135,000. It was the second largest amount given away in the deal after almost 5,800 people entered.

“It feels great,” Marchi told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “It was my first big shot, so it was emotional.” He notched his largest online MTT score to date by a factor of five and narrowly fell short of his second Sunday Major win this year.

The Maltese player said that the tournament started well, but he wasn’t focused too much on it since he had plenty of other tables loaded as well. To end his day, however, he had just the Sunday Million and Sunday 500 left and was deep in both. “The field was easy,” he said. “I managed to arrive at the final table with a big chip lead after winning a huge coin flip with two tables left.”

Once at the final table, Marchi was patient, picked up his spots, and put pressure on others. “Everyone was playing really tight due to the pay jumps, so it was easy to take the dead money,” he explained. “After losing a couple of pots, I decided to take a look at the ICM numbers. The pay jumps were huge.”

Marchi narrated how the deal went down in case you didn’t see it unfold: “We saw the ICM numbers and the other two guys were really happy to chop it up. I think I was the one leaving some EV with the deal, but I was okay with it because of the huge pay jumps. I asked for a little more and they agreed. We then started playing for $20,000 to the winner.”

When we caught up with Marchi, he was debating whether to jump on a plane and head to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. His flat-mate had decided to go, which left Marchi mulling whether to follow suit. “It’s tough because I don’t enjoy live poker too much,” he commented.

Marchi has a little over $1 million in online MTT cashes to his name and joined PocketFives last November. “I had a little bit of success quickly, starting with sit and gos, then switching to cash games and finally switching to MTTs,” he said of his career. Nowadays, he occasionally dabbles in Six-Max Zoom cash games, but mainly sticks to MTTs.

As we mentioned, the Sunday Million chopper is the top-ranked player in Malta(pictured) and was once ranked as high as #25 worldwide on PocketFives. Now, he’s #39. “Malta is small and in winter it’s not very good,” he said. “But now with the summer it’s better. There’s a lot of sun, beaches, and tourists coming here. We have quite a decent group of Italian poker players here in Malta, so life is good now.”

Marchi is originally from Rome, but moved from Italy to Malta in order to be able to play online poker on the dot-com sites. In Italy, players are confined to sparsely-trafficked dot-it rooms, which puts a damper on a person’s ability to play professionally. As he put it, “There are small fields and small guarantees, which are not very tempting for an MTT grinder.”

Oh yeah, if you’re curious as to how Marchi went out of the Sunday Million, he lost K-K to K-6 suited all-in pre-flop and then lost a race with A-J against 4-4. Despite one brutal beat and a failed coin flip, he was still in very good spirits, saying, “It still feels good to book a nice win.”

Congrats to girex91 on his Sunday Million chop. Visit PokerStars for more details about the weekly tournament.

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Image courtesy Pokerfirma