Two weeks ago, Morten MortenVMMortensen (pictured), who hails from Denmark, finished second in the $530 buy-in PartyPoker High Rollerfor $23,000. The tournament, which is also run on sites like WPT Poker, carries a $100,000 guarantee, which was smashed on that fateful day when 304 players turned out. Mortensen fell heads-up to OjanViskaSyn, who reeled in nearly $40,000 for the win, and the top 40 finished in the money.

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Other scores for Mortensen include a $19,000 haul for taking fourth in the PokerStarsSuper Tuesday last June and a $15,000 payday for being the runner-up in the site’s Big $55 five days ago. One successful Sunday will earn him his $500,000 cash badgehere on PocketFives and he can be found at #219 worldwide in the Poker Player Rankings. According to the Hendon Mob database, Mortensen has over $300,000 in career live tournament cashes.

It took us a few days, but PocketFives managed to run down Mortensen to discuss his life in the Scandinavian country.

PocketFives: Thanks for joining us all the way from Denmark. Tell us how you’re feeling about your PartyPoker High Roller runner-up finish.

Morten Mortensen: It’s a really nice feeling to end Sundays with a big score. That being said, there are always mixed feelings when you finish second in a poker tournament, and since I have buy-ins between $4,000 and $8,000 on normal Sundays, the finish is not something I gave too much thought to. I had a nice dinner with my roommate and fellow poker player Rasmus RasA86 Agarskov the very next day.

PocketFives: Tell us about PartyPoker’s High Roller. What is the field like?

Morten Mortensen: In general, all High Rollers are a bit more difficult than regular tournaments. I actually feel like Party’s High Roller normally has the strongest field of players of the weekly High Roller tournaments, except for maybe the Super Tuesday on PokerStars.

PocketFives: You have more than 10 poker site names verified in your PocketFives profile. What are a couple of your favorite tournaments on those sites?

Morten Mortsensen: The $525 Ongame High Roller each Tuesday is by far my favorite. It has a lot of good players for sure, but Ongame runs a lot of satellites to it as well, which keeps the regular field a bit softer than the usual High Roller tournaments.

The PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up and Sunday Million would be the obvious picks for #2 and #3, but I haven’t done really well in either of those. My last picks would be the $200 Sunday ChampionChip on Ongame and the Super Tuesday on PokerStars, not because they have many weak players, but because I really enjoy playing the more expensive online tournaments. For some reason, I seem to play them more seriously than the $50 freezeouts, a leak I need to get fixed.

PocketFives: How did you get started in poker?

Morten Mortensen: Pretty much the usual story. I started playing home games and stuff like that. I quickly started experimenting with online poker and ever since, poker has been my profession. To start with, I played heads-up sit and gos, but these days I play almost all tournaments, both live and online.

PocketFives: Why did you want to play poker full-time? Did you have any other options?

Morten Mortensen: The youth in Denmark have all the options in the world since education is free here, and so did I. But to be honest, I just fell in love with idea of being free and being able to travel and knew the only way I could realize that was by playing poker.