Germany’s rounder3989is one-for-one in the Full Tilt Poker Sunday Brawl. That’s not an easy tournament to win either, as it brought out 1,186 entrants in mid-January and awarded a first place prize of $47,000. The bottom line: it was a good weekend to be rounder3989. Amazingly, it was the first time he had ever registered for the Sunday Brawl.

“It felt awesome to finally bink a major on a Sunday,” rounder3989 told PocketFives in an exclusive interview, “especially because the final table started pretty badly for me. I got there 1/9 and was down to 9/9 pretty quickly after losing 6-6 to A-2 all-in pre-flop.”

He rehashed that the group of nine was playing fairly cautiously at first. “Most players were about 20 to 30 big blinds deep and the big stacks were dictating the first hour of final table play,” he explained. “I was pretty card dead and didn’t find many spots to pick up chips in the first hour. I was down to 10 big blinds and picked up A-K three times in five hands, but didn’t get any action. I got back to 16 big blinds and got it in with J-J versus A-K. I had a fairly tight image, so I finally got a chance to put some pressure on.”

After an hour at the final table, the field had been trimmed to six and rounder3989 busted an opponent with A-K against 7-7. “From there, it kind of went my way,” he narrated. “Four-handed, I got very lucky to pick up A-A and got it in three ways versus the K-K of the player who was second in chips and a short stack’s A-9. That pot made me a 5:1 favorite heads-up.”

As far as the money goes from the Brawl and $200,000 Guaranteed, rounder3989 told us that he doesn’t have any plans for it at the moment. However, he is studying abroad in Halifax, Nova Scotia (pictured), a town he called “expensive, so I kind of needed the money.”

Why Halifax of all places? Why not somewhere a little less cold? “For Germans, it is always good for the resume to study in an English-speaking country and, since I’m not allowed to grind in the US, I ended up in Halifax,” he said. “I also heard it was a great place for partying, which is so true. I graduated over the summer and am currently in the first year of getting my Masters. I’m doing industrial engineering and it’s going pretty well so far.”

He plans to take a semester off and play poker full-time to test the waters. “That was always the plan even if I hadn’t shipped the Brawl,” he pointed out, “but I’m definitely going to work in a real full-time job after university.”

rounder3989 started playing poker six years ago after the game became popularized in Germany. He recalled, “I started playing a few home games with friends and micro-stakes sit and gos on PokerStars. I always was good at math, so I had a good feeling about a lot of spots, although I wasn’t really sure what I was doing.”

Along the way, he found poker training sites like PocketFives Trainingand PokerXFactor, which he said helped “a lot. What helped me the most was talking about hands with other players and constantly reviewing my game and getting a second opinion about almost every spot.” In the meantime, he is the 90th ranked player in Germany and one of two registered PocketFivers with PLB scores from the city of Karlsruhe.

The Sunday Brawl runs weekly on Full Tilt Poker. If you don’t already have a Full Tilt account, sign up through PocketFives’ links to get afree $25 in most locations plus one free month of PocketFives Training. Get started here.

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