One PocketFiver who turned heads last weekend was Unbay2k4, who took down the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up for a healthy $105,000. It was a weekend where the entire focus of the online poker world was on the finale of the Full Tilt Online Poker Series, where both the $2,620 buy-in Two-Day tournament and Main Event played down to winners. Meanwhile, Rastelli blazed through a field of 3,373 entrants, defeating fellow PocketFiver JSchnett heads up to win the Sunday Warm-Up. It was the largest cash of the Philadelphia native’s poker career. PocketFives.com sat down with Rastelli to talk about his monster payday and signature online poker win.

Getting your first major tournament win under your belt is an important hurdle that many talented poker players will eventually achieve. For this superstar, it came just a few months after he began to play poker professionally. He commented, “It was huge. I didn’t think it would happen for a couple of more months. It was more than I expected. When I got to the final table, I took a glance at my competition. Three of us had about six million in chips, so I wanted to lay tight in the beginning until play got to be five or six-handed. When we got down to five players left, we started talking about a chop. One person didn’t want to do it, so we played it out.” One man’s obstinacy about not wanting to chop turned into a $105,000 payday for him.

You’ll find him playing in the afternoon $30 rebuy on Ultimate Bet if he’s not playing in tournaments at the Borgata in Atlantic City. In January, he chopped a $1,000 no limit event at the casino. Online, he finished fourth in the $55 buy-in Daily Eighty Grand on PokerStars for $6,000 in late July. He worked as an engineer for one year before being laid off last September. His focus quickly turned to poker, where he laughed, “there’s a lot more money to be had.”

He got into poker when he was 21, which was five years ago. He explained, “Some of my friends starting playing on PokerStars. I started playing Pot Limit Omaha cash games on UltimateBet. I’m good at math, so I thought I could get more out of that game. I never did well at multi-table tournaments and never realized how much money there was in them until I checked out sites like PocketFives. Now, it seems like I wasted my time playing cash games.”

Rastelli feels like he has better results playing cash games in casinos, where he can actually read opponents by looking at their body language. In the case of multi-table tournaments, however, “they’re easier to play online. You need a routine or a system to get through them.” As you might be able to tell, Rastelli is still a student of the game and enjoys being able to dissect the mathematical side of poker. He describes what makes poker so intriguing to him at age 26: “The competition. I think a lot of people are playing for the wrong reasons: They see they money; I’m here to learn the game. Playing poker online is good, but you need to play live poker to understand the game better. Once I get a decent bankroll, I want to make the transition into live poker.”

Like others that we’ve interviewed in recent weeks on PocketFives.com, Rastelli prefers to play just two tables online at once, which is considered low by many standards. What he does have in common with other members of the online poker community, however, is his love for sports. He noted, “I play roller hockey for a league. In the summer time, I try to keep it simple; I like to boat and fish. I played hockey in high school and also played some in college. I play a lot of sports. One thing you see is that poker players are ex-athletes who didn’t make it big.”

For Rastelli, he was able to make it big in online poker. Congratulations on winning the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up from all of us at PocketFives.com.