Heading into last week’s Full Tilt Sunday Brawl, Colombia’s marroca5was on a major downswing with no end in sight. He told PocketFives that he usually doesn’t get discouraged by the swings of poker, but this time was different: “This one was very discouraging because I was on an MTT downswing and, on top of that, I had played cash games and stakes I don’t usually play. That combined with some difficulties I was going through outside of poker simply had me on the wrong road, and now I feel back on track in every aspect.”

“Back” means a $40,000 bankroll boost, by the way, which was his reward for taking down the Sunday Brawl. He had to beat out 874 other players in the process and edged out fellow Full Tilt player marko2701heads-up. He gleaned from ear to ear, telling us, “It’s always nice to book an outright win in a Sunday Major, especially since I was coming from a significant downswing.”

He rehashed that the initial stages of the Sunday Brawl played out in a pretty standard fashion: “I never had much in the way of cards to play with, but I preserved a stack and cruised through the tournament. I got a rush of cards a couple of times when I was deeper into the tournament, which allowed me to enter the final three tables with an above average stack and then it got more interesting.”

By “more interesting,” he meant several important bluffs to keep his stack size afloat. Then, he found himself all-in with pocket nines against an opponent’s K-10 with two tables to go. His pocket pair held up, crippling one of the top talents left, and marroca5 claimed a top three stack.

From there, he explained, “I had probably the worst position at the final table, but there were some soft spots and the fact that I had a nice stack helped. After a hand in which I doubled up courtesy of another big stack in a 4bet pot where I had A-K, I was in pretty good shape to take it down.”

He added, “I won another important flip four-handed and entered heads-up play with a 2:1 deficit in chips, which I had the fortune to turn around pretty quickly. At that point, the other guy offered a deal and we looked at the numbers, but I didn’t like the deal he was offering and he wouldn’t improve it, so we went on. On the final hand, I shoved on the turn with an open-ended straight draw after he bet. He called with K-K and I sucked out on him like a champ to win.” Game. Set. Match.

The Sunday Brawl features a $40 per head bounty. We asked him how much, if any, he values the extra incentive to knock someone out: “I don’t value it too much. I just try to focus on how the table is playing and try to make the best decisions based on that, not the bounties. The value of getting deep in the tournament is much greater than picking up a couple of bounties.”

He is now up to over $2.6 million in tracked cashes in his PocketFives profile and is the top ranked player in his home nation of Colombia (pictured). The $40,000 score is the seventh largest we’ve tracked for the Colombian, whose largest online score to date came in late 2010 in an FTOPS tournament and was good for $95,000. His poker career also includes a SCOOP title and a victory in the Sunday Mulligan.

Colombia is #32 worldwide in the PocketFives Country Poker Rankings, down one spot on the week. There are 196 PocketFives members who call Colombia home and it is sandwiched in between New Zealand and Thailand on the leaderboard.

See what’s brewing in our Colombia poker community.

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