Earlier this month, the 131 registered PocketFives members from the European nation of Austria partied in the streets. Why? Gerald RingelsdorfKarlic recorded the win in the iPoker Network’s weekly $200,000 Guaranteed and came away with a $34,000 payday. If you’re not familiar with the six-figure guaranteed tournament, it comes with a price tag of $215 and, on January 8th, it drew a crowd of 1,007 entrants. We caught up with Karlic to discuss his big win.

Karlic signed up for Poker770, an iPoker Network site, and the $200,000 Guaranteed was the very first tournament he played there. On why he signed up for Poker770 in the first place and what he thought of the structure of the $200,000 Guaranteed, Karlic told us, “I registered because of a freeroll for a live event in Vienna. The structure was very good. I was never on the verge of busting and I’m looking forward to the next one. The levels had nice jumps, the starting stack was good, the levels were long enough, the average stack was always high, and it was comfortable to play.”

He’s up to over $300,000 in tracked cashes, about one-sixth of which came in 2009, when Karlic finished fourth in the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up for $51,000. That tournament drew over 4,500 runners and featured members of the PocketFives community in five of the top 10 spots.

Despite his $200,000 Guaranteed win being for less money than his Warm-Up final table, Karlic told us that he was elated to get a Sunday Major victory: “I had a nice run and my aggression factor helped me along. I was, from the beginning, one of the big stacks and was able to play my big stack style. It worked out really well.”

On PocketFives, the top ranked Austrian poker player is Dattebayo, a two-time Triple Crownwinner who can be found at #25 in the PocketFives Rankings. Karlic told us that his homeland has two main poker rooms: “Every day, we have tournaments in each of the casinos and we regularly have bigger buy-in tournaments as well. Those have great structures, quite a lot of people, and a lot of money to win.”

He continued, “I used to win a lot of those when I was playing them quite frequently. How many people played depended on the tournament and buy-in, but they usually got about 100 to 500 people per tournament, sometimes more.”

Speaking of the live arena, Karlic took second in a €1,100 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event held during the German Championship of Poker in Rozvadov in July of last year and banked nearly $50,000. The field of that tournament numbered 222 and the event resulted in his largest live cash to date according to the Hendon Mob database.

He got his start in the game playing with friends at the age of 16 and then migrated to play money tables online. Like plenty of other poker players, he ultimately moved to real money games, signed up for PocketFives in mid-2011, and the rest, as they say, is history. Here is how the top nine players cashed out in the $200,000 Guaranteed on the iPoker Network back on January 8th:

1. FuICM – $34,238.00 (Ringelsdorf)
2. misabe111 – $25,175.00
3. shipthediip – $19,112.86 (Gandrup)
4. ParaPoke – $13,695.20
5. GetItQuietly67 – $9,969.30 (Bonified)
6. petersen1 – $7,955.30
7. LordLaui – $5,941.30
8. OWNEDBYVODKA – $3,927.30
9. reraiser3 – $2,175.12

Visit Poker770for more details and to sign up for the next running of the $200,000 Guaranteed. As a reminder, Poker770 offers a $170 no deposit bonus for members of PocketFives. Visit the official thread in the Poker Sites forum for more information and to get started.