Earlier this month, PocketFiver David d.quangQuang (pictured) lit up the field of the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl, coming in second place for $17,000. There were 612 entrants and the cash helped push him to just shy of $2.5 million in lifetime scores. “It’s always a great feeling to final table any major, but it’s never an awesome feeling if you don’t win it,” he told us. “I also final tabled the Big $109 that Sunday and lost a flip on the river for the chip lead to bust in sixth. If I had finished in the top three in that, I would’ve felt pretty awesome.”

The Brawl is a $255 No Limit Hold’em Re-Entry Knockout tournament and, as such, you accumulate cash for every opponent you bust. We’ve heard varying degrees of how much the bounties affect a player’s strategy, leading Quang to say, “Aside from Progressive Knockout tournaments where the bounty’s value increases, I just play my normal game. To be honest, I didn’t even look at how many bounties I accumulated in this.”

While finishing second in the Brawl is a solid accomplishment, it’s even more impressive when you consider it came a few weeks after Quang final tabled the WCOOP Super Tuesday for $63,000. “That one felt awesome,” Quang gleaned. “It was a WCOOP event and it was my largest online cash ever.” He finished third in the Super Tuesday twice in a four-week span in 2013 for almost $100,000 combined.

In the WCOOP Super Tuesday, he made it through Day 1 with a scant 17 big blinds and seemed to be hanging on by a thread. However, on Day 2, he ran his stack up to 100 big blinds in the first few levels. As he joked, “I was definitely the dealer’s favorite player, as I was getting dealt premium hand after premium hand and getting paid every time. That heater lasted until the final two tables; that’s when I ran out of ammo and busted in sixth place. I thought the level of competition was the same as a normal Super Tuesday: always very challenging with very few soft spots.”

As you might have guessed by the title of this article, his plans for the money consist of “doubling down on MTTs.” He has certainly come a long way since getting into poker while attending school in Waterloo, Ontario. He saw a clip about poker prodigies from Waterloo on a WPT episode “where they were saying there’s something in the city’s water. They nailed it. I thought poker was interesting because there are so many aspects of the game you can apply to real-life decisions.”

Mike timexMcDonald (pictured), Steven stevejpaPaul-Ambrose, Will TheDreamerMa, Nenad Medic, and Mike SirWattsWatson all come from the Waterloo carousel. Across the country, Quang grinds online in an office in Gastown, Vancouver with taikogod, CaptnKrnch, and Bryan PrimordialAA Pellegrino. He said, “We all have goals written on a white board. My goals are to get below 180 pounds by the end of the month and play over 750 tournaments per month.”

He closed by sending a shout out to shhhookem, Mike Pipedream17Dietrich, Ankush pistons87Mandavia, and GINS FINEST “for teaching me how to strategically win coin flips like a boss.”

The Sunday Brawl runs weekly on Full Tilt Poker. If you don’t already have a Full Tilt account, sign up through the links on PocketFives to get a 100% up to $600 deposit bonus and a free PocketFives t-shirt delivered to your doorstep. Click here to get started.

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