Last week, in a battle of PocketFives.com members, Galen Turk MalloyHall (pictured) defeated Chris Gettin DaizeOliver in the finals of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) Main Event. Hall booked approximately $2.1 million for the win, while Oliver pocketed a not-so-paltry $2 million following a heads-up chop. This week, Hall is our featured guest on the PocketFives.com Podcast, which features brand new co-host Jake 7DeLuX Wilkins.

Hall sits at #62 worldwide in the PocketFives.com Rankings, up two spots on the week, and he’s a former winner of the Absolute Poker $150,000 Guarantee and PokerStars Nightly Hundred Grand. Still, nothing compares to over $2 million in cold, hard cash. “It has just started to sink in for the first time,” Hall admitted. “I played my first online session in a few weeks last night. I got in aces on the bubble of some tournament and lost. I looked at my screen and started laughing like, ‘Who cares?’ I think that was the first time it sunk in when I realized the magnitude of the stakes I had been playing for at the PCA and how lucky I was to run well and win that event.”

Oliver (pictured) is a former #1 player in the Rankings and a two-time Monthly PLB champ. Hall assessed his heads-up opponent’s game: “He’s a very good player and he’s very aggressive. No matter who you are, [he’s] going to be difficult to play against, but I think I wore him down during the course of the heads-up. We both had a pretty clear strategy and tactically were on the same level on a lot of different things, but we each made a couple of errors throughout the match. I think the biggest difference was that I bounced back from my errors really well.”

When we tried to schedule Hall for the Podcast, he told us that he still works part-time and thus balances poker with other life endeavors. “I just play as much as I can on Sundays and Wednesdays, which are the biggest tournament days,” Hall told the PocketFives.com Podcast. “I 16-table, which is above average, but not in the top grinder echelon. I think playing less doesn’t hurt me… because time off helps you keep perspective on the game, detach from it a bit, and be hungry on the days you do play.”

The buzz worthy hand from heads-up play came when Hall mucked a Wheel when Oliver made a full house on the river. Oliver checked his boat and Hall fired out a pot-sized bet of two million. His opponent came over the top all-in and Hall abandoned ship. On his river bet, Hall explained, “When I bet full pot, the impetus for that is his calling range is very inelastic… There’s no reason to bet one million when he’s going to call two million with almost the exact same frequency. The other thing is that betting full pot makes it much more difficult for him to put moves on me. It makes his actions a lot clearer.”

Hall continued with his thought process when Oliver check-raised all-in: “When he check-jammed on me, I started to think about what his value range was in this spot and what his bluffing frequency was. The more that I thought about it, if he had a four for a straight, he’s going to call rather than raise. Even if he has 6-4, it’s a much better spot to call than jam… It was such an unnecessary and risky size for bluffing and it wasn’t something he had done the entire match.”

Later this year, Hall will head to Stanford University to pursue an MBA. On his poker plans during the two-year business program, Hall forecasted, “I haven’t planned at all what I’m going to play next year. MBA programs are super busy and super fun. It’s a good opportunity to be around a lot of really interesting people. It’s only two years and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn a lot. I don’t know how much poker I’ll be playing at school, probably very little.”

Check out the rest of this week’s PocketFives.com Poker Podcast.