2013 has been a quality year for Finland’s Tomi Brouk (pictured), who is known on PocketFives as emeriaa. Why? Brouk has thundered through the online poker world, winning three Triple Crownsand recently taking down the High Roller on Winamax. If you’ve never heard of the High Roller, it’s a $373 buy-in tournament that any player from the European Union can sign up for.

By the way, if you’re from the EU, register for Winamax through PocketFives and make a deposit to get one free month of PocketFives Training with the sign-up fee waived, a $65 value, plus an exclusive PLB competition. Get started here. Now, let’s get to the interview.

“I’m feeling good obviously,” Brouk told PocketFives. “It’s nice to bink something on Sundays. Winning a High Roller is a good boost for your confidence even though this particular one is definitely not the toughest one.” Brouk told us he started playing on Winamax a couple of months ago and was “positively surprised about the software and tournament schedule overall. I have nothing bad to say about the site really.”

We asked Brouk to break down the High Roller. He told us, “The buy-in was €300 and it was one of the biggest tournaments on my schedule. French people like to play very, very deep. The structure was okay, but nothing super slow even though we started with so many chips. The field is pretty decent for a tournament that has such a big buy-in. There are some players outside of France, but most of the people are from France, which is a good thing. There are good French regs, but I think there are also lots of not so good players.”

To wrap up our discussion of Winamax, Brouk told us that the software is “pretty good, much better than iPoker, 888, or Microgaming. I multi-table up to 25 tables, so it’s pretty important that things like auto-time bank, warning sounds when it’s your time to act, and the overall visual experience of the table are working properly. I think Winamax delivers in all of those things.”

As we said at the top, Brouk has scored three Triple Crowns this year. The sites they occurred on and the PLB Points generated in the process were as follows:

March 30, 2013: PokerStars.fr, PartyPoker, and William Hill for 592.43 points
June 7, 2013: EuroPoker, PokerStars.fr, and William Hill for 382.88 points
August 17, 2013: William Hill, Winamax, and PartyPoker for 521.31 points

Brouk actually owns four Triple Crowns overall and explained that his close family and friends are in tune with his poker career. However, “I don’t tell every detail money-wise, but otherwise I’m pretty honest about what I do. They were all pretty skeptical early on, but overall their opinions changed quickly after they realized I’m actually making money and not losing it.”

Brouk has been a member of PocketFives since 2009 and is on the cusp of breaking $2.5 million in tracked online poker cashes. We asked for the best and worst parts about being a professional player: “The best is probably the freedom that poker provides money-wise and time-wise. I also love what I do and even though a lot of people complain that poker is getting harder, I love the competition. The worst part is the stress and downswings. I think poker also demands so much time and energy that if you want to compete at the highest stakes, it takes time away from other things in life.”

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