The 24th event of the recently finished Mini Full Tilt Online Poker Series(MiniFTOPS) saw Daniel DNA2RNAHirleman come away with a payday of $116,000 following a two-way chop with Full Tilt Poker member FiskenPPP. Over 33,000 entries were recorded in the $33 No Limit Hold’em Multi-Entry tournament and nearly 3,700 players landed in the money. It marked Hirleman’s largest online poker cash to date and it came on the same day as a win in the Full Tilt $150,000 Guarantee for $39,000. PocketFives.com caught up with Hirleman to break down his big day.

He casually told us, “You hope to run that good on any given Sunday, but it never happens.” He’s relatively new in the world of MTTs, having only started playing the poker genre a few years ago. Most of his volume has come in the $27 to $60 buy-in range, which makes his $33 Multi-Entry win even sweeter. He admitted, “Getting my first six-figure score from a $33 tournament is so satisfying given all the games I’ve played at those stakes.”

The day after his monumental $150,000 payday, Hirleman was scheduled to head out to San Jose, California for the World Poker Tour’s Bay 101 Shooting Star event. He told us, “I hadn’t done any laundry or packed or anything and I was going to fly out on Monday afternoon, so I decided I was going to quit playing early. Actually, if I had thought about it closely, I wouldn’t have played the $33 MiniFTOPS event because it was a good structure with four entries. I should have known it would go well into the night and it was the last tournament I signed up for on Full Tilt.”

He attempted to lock up a six-figure payday when five players remained, but the chop ultimately wasn’t agreed to. “I definitely wanted the $100,000 from this one,” Hirleman recalled, “So when my opponent wanted to chop heads-up, I went for it.” His chopping partner came away with $120,000 and the win.

He got started in poker as part of a home game with friends while attending pharmacy school. He outlined his journey from there: “I beat them up pretty good and thought, ‘This is easy.’ I put $100 on PartyPoker and lost it. I deposited another $100, but I haven’t had to deposit since my third $100. I finished school and got my Doctor of Pharmacy.”

His brother, QuasiFiction, sits at #7 in the PocketFives.com Sortable Rankings for Arizona, a leaderboard that Hirleman owns the top spot in. The MiniFTOPS chopper taught his brother how to play poker and the two lived together when Hirleman graduated from school. He commented, “I went to work for about eight months and my brother was making three times what I was, so I quit in February 2008. I quit literally two days before they laid off the entire office.”

QuasiFiction’s largest cash came after he finished second in a $1,050 No Limit Hold’em tournament during the 2008 PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker for over $300,000. After seeing his brother’s success, Hirleman decided to take the plunge: “I thought I had a great career to fall back on if poker didn’t work, so I gave it a try.”

Hirleman was sixth in chips following his first day of play in the Bicycle Casino’s Big Event and also played in the L.A. Poker Classic. According to the Hendon Mob, his largest live cash came in the 2009 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure for $12,000. With his newfound cash windfall, he’s looking to extend his reach even further into the live poker realm.

Visit Full Tilt Pokerfor more information on the MiniFTOPS. Also, check out the complete FTOPS XX schedule, which was released in recent days.