In a $1,050 No Limit Hold’em event held during the recently completed PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker, or SCOOP, Andrew APD Dean (pictured) came away with a three-way chop for a hefty $151,000 payday. For Dean, it marked his largest tracked score on PocketFives by a wide margin. Last October, he won the PokerStars Super Tuesday for $66,000; he also has a victory in the site’s Sunday 500.

“They agreed to give me more money than ICM,” Dean told PocketFives in an exclusive interview when asked to recap the chop discussions. “I figured it would give me a better chance to play for the title instead of trying to ladder up to second place money. Then, the first hand after chopping, the other two players got dealt K-K and A-A and I was suddenly heads-up with just over a 2:1 chip disadvantage.”

Dean was ultimately bucked from the tournament in second place, but still received over $150,000. After 1,179 players entered the $1K SCOOP event, the tournament offered a prize pool that was nearly double its $600,000 guarantee.

He has over $1.5 million in tracked cashes in his PocketFives profile and has been a member of the site since May 2011. Nearly all of his tracked winnings have come on PokerStars, where he racked up over $200,000 in May alone in 89 in the money finishes.

As you might expect in a SCOOP tournament with a four-figure buy-in, Dean told us that the field was “pretty tough.” He shared the plight he found himself in down the home stretch: “I had a really bad seat from the final three tables on, with setherson2and ely-cash41 3betting a ton and just generally being super active. They were both to my direct left, so I definitely played a little nittier with opening pots than I normally would deep in a big tourney like this one.”

By the way, setherson2 sits at #125 in the PocketFives Rankings and nearly cracked the top 100 last month.

Dean mentioned to us that he played over 20,000 No Limit Hold’em MTTs in 2011 and managed to make it as high as #54 worldwide in the Rankings. Now, he’s fallen back to #255, but said the drop could be due to the fact that he hasn’t played much poker this year sans the PokerStars TCOOP and SCOOP.

What was he doing instead? What diverted his attention from the poker-sphere? Dean told us, “I went back to live at school with my buddies from back home. I really had a good time for the semester while taking some time away from poker. It was pretty natural to start back up since last year I played a lot more tables and for longer hours. The time off helped me focus compared to sessions I played at the end of last year.”

He added that SCOOP meant a rare opportunity to play cards: “I knew that SCOOP was the only time I’d have to play online until the end of the summer, so I never felt anything close to burnt out during it.”

Dean started down the poker road after playing $10 tournaments with friends. In 2004, he deposited money online via a bonus and played six-max cash games “to make enough money for a high school kid. I decided around the end of 2010 to give MTTs a shot and ended up grinding in 2011 full-time for the first time.”

The structure of tournaments series like SCOOP and WCOOP might play into Dean’s experience in cash games. He told PocketFives, “Most MTT regs could learn a lot from cash game players, especially when it comes to slower, deeper stacked structures like SCOOP and WCOOP. Good cash players, in general, are more creative in their lines post-flop and better at taking down pots they have no business winning. They’re also better at extracting maximum value when they have a strong hand.”

Visit PokerStars to relive all of the action from the 2012 SCOOP.