On the last Sunday of March, Miguel kingmiguel3King (pictured) took down the iPoker Network Sunday Special to the tune of $34,000. He beat a field of over 2,200 entrants in the $95 No Limit Hold’em tournament and, unfortunately for his facial hair, it was time for a shave. “I can shave now,” King joked. “I told myself I wasn’t shaving until I made $50,000 this year.”

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“The final table was all about determining a lead early on since there were clumped up stack sizes and no clear leaders,” King said of the finale of the Sunday Special. “Three of us had close to four million in chips, a second row of guys had two million to three million, and there were a couple of players with less than that.”

King was gifted Big Slick a few times and said he “decided to play it while applying maximum pressure so I made sure I got my chips in instead of being forced to make a big call or laydown. This gave me some leverage and a few chips, so I got be the chip leader eventually. Overall, I got a few nice spots early on, nobody seemed to do much about the aggression, and I determined who would be the chip leader.”

As far as the $34,000 goes, King plans to rent a place in Barcelona, Spain (pictured) next year and will also spend some when his friends come into town shortly. On his need for a crash pad in Spain, King said, “I will be living in the UK and grinding, but my girlfriend will be studying in Barcelona, so I’ll be catching some sun to say the least.”

King got his start in poker in a pool bar in Girona, Spain called Sbarjo. “I started off playing for fun,” he recalled. “The game would usually consist of a €5 sit and go where 80% of the time I didn’t have the €5, so Craig, Mike, and Lasse put the €5 down for me. These friends are keys to my poker success. I dabbled online with the money I made from some miniscule home games where we would play deep-stacked sit and gos for €1.” His first online games were on PokerStars.

He described his girlfriend as “the single biggest motivation and force behind me,” adding that she even has a love for poker: “She grinds online and plays some live tournaments too. I don’t think I could have achieved what I have without her, not while maintaining a happy lifestyle anyway. She is so aggro and cashes every liveament! That’s the opposite of me: I fold a lot and bust every live game.”

King’s other driving force besides his girlfriend is his father, whom he said is “the coolest dad in the world. I never lost in the playground at ‘My dad is better than your dad.’” All of his various influences have combined to give King a half-million bucks in tracked scores.

On the side, King enjoys cooking and tennis. He has played the latter for 15 years and buys a new cookbook every six months in order to stoke his interest in the former. He said, “Everybody should check out TouchTennis. It’s a miniature version of tennis with soft balls, but do not be fooled; it is a competitive sport for those who want it to be. It’s a lot of fun.” You can learn more at TouchTennis.com.

King closed by sending shout outs to a variety of friends including Hannah, matt2120, Dad, Jack, Louis Salter, John Shamon, Lasse, Craig, Mike, Heather, and Ricard Bozicevich. “They have all put in their share of favors, buy-ins, beds, pep talks, late night kebabs, and beers,” he said. Sounds like quite a loyal group!

Congrats to King on all of his success. We expect even more five-figure scores going forward.

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