You remember the days of being a newbie in poker. For PocketFiver Simon Ronnow Pedersen (pictured), known as IgorKon our site, those days are, thankfully, long past. Last month, he took down the PartyPoker $200,000 Guaranteedfor $32,000. He plays on the site under the user name SuzukiTorben007.

“I’m feeling quite good,” Pedersen told PocketFives after the fact. “It was nice to finally close a Major. The last few weeks have been pretty brutal with some ninths and tenths in various Majors.” There were 845 entrants that week, which meant the prize pool fell short of the guarantee and a $31,000 overlay was up for grabs.

Pedersen described the final stages of the tournament as a “hard endgame.” He explained, “When we were 16 left, there were still three of my friends who are also some of Denmark’s best MTT regs left. So, we had a recipe for some fun and interesting hands. I got to the final table second in chips, but after some important hands and steady grind, I was the chip leader and didn’t look back. It was a mix of good timing and some important holds.”

As far as the money goes, he’ll recoup a chunk of the previous month’s losses. He also entered last month’s SCOOP with a high degree of motivation and confidence.

The Dane has $1.2 million in tracked online tournament winnings and had a strong end to 2014 with wins in the Sunday Supersonic and Big $109 for a combined $90,000.

“It was huge for my career,” Pedersen said of last year. “2014 was absurdly good for me. I was lucky enough to have some of the greatest Danish players around me. I also had a lot of off-table work and obviously an absurd amount of run-good.”

The year wasn’t without a few hiccups, though. He candidly explained, “In the middle of the whole thing, right after my Supersonic win, my PokerStars account got banned. It was all because my account had been hacked and PokerStars saw some strange changes to my IP logins. It turned out that a former friend had, without my knowledge, been logging into my account. So, his account was banned and mine was too.”

Pedersen ended up in time out from PokerStars for three months. He said that during that 90 days he had to “twiddle my thumbs when I had just lost 80% of my volume. But, the first session after my return to PokerStars, I won the Big $109. It was definitely a breakthrough for me on the MTT scene, especially with my side event win at EPT Vienna.”

As Pedersen mentioned, he won a €1,100 No Limit Hold’em Single Re-Entry tournament at EPT Vienna (pictured) in March 2014 for $101,000. He’s #97 on the all-time money list for Denmark, according to the Hendon Mob.

The PartyPoker $200K winner got his start in poker with friends in a basement. He recalled, “I remember I was looking at a sheet of poker hand rankings while I was playing, but I don’t think it helped at all.”

Away from poker, Pedersen spends time with his girlfriend and poker friends. He told us, “If I’m not grinding my ass off, I really enjoying fishing at the Danish coasts and trying to find time to hit the gym. That isn’t always easy with a messed up sleeping pattern.”

Congrats to Pedersen on his Sunday Major win!

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