An online poker tournament gave PocketFives U.K. member Weland tlt17 Holroyd (pictured) $122,000. Yet, as he told us, his primary focus will remain on his “real world” job in the oil and gas industry: “My career first and foremost is within the oil and gas industry, but fortunately this affords me reasonable time off to play if I choose to.”

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So what was that big tournament? You know it as the PokerStars Sunday Million, and he finished third in it for $122,000 a couple of weeks ago. He told us, “I’m obviously feeling good about the score. It’s nice to have some success after numerous near misses.”

We asked Holroyd to break down his run through the Sunday Million. He told us that, overall, his journey was “straightforward” after getting stacked early on. He added, “There were no really tough decisions until much later in the tournament. Due to previous experience, I felt pretty confident in my awareness of stack value deep and ran pretty well from about 20 players to the final table. I lost one huge pot on the final table bubble with A-J against K-J, but won my fair share of flips to go into the final table with the chip lead.”

Holroyd is up to over $770,000 in tracked online poker MTT cashes in his PocketFives profile, the bulk of which has come on PokerStars, where he plays as holly17. He now has $122,000 to play with and said, “It means playing relatively stress-free and, therefore, any poker winnings are a nice supplementary income. This score and some recent success have tempted me to go full-time, but currently I feel I have a pretty sweet deal and, with a young family, I prefer to remain in a job I enjoy. The money makes things a lot easier family-wise and also allows me to grind a lot more high-stakes games if I want to.”

He is an engineer in the oil and gas industry and works predominantly on rigs and installations in the North Sea. “We travel out to the rigs by helicopter,” the recent Sunday Million final tablist told us, “and on average work away from home approximately 100 to 180 days a year. I’ve worked all over the world in the past, but again, with a young family, I prefer not to be away for long periods of time.”

When Holroyd heads out to the North Sea, he is usually gone one to three weeks. “It’s difficult to play when I’m away,” he admitted. “The internet connection is dodgy and also if we are away, we are usually working, so I tend not to play when away. I feel my job prevents me from becoming stale in poker and usually I come home eager to play.”

Back home, he has a fiancée whom he has known for 13 years and two children, a three-year-old and a four-month-old. “Juggling family tasks and poker can be tough,” he explained. “But, my Mrs. is very accommodating and lets me play as long as it doesn’t get too consuming.”

He started playing poker in small-stakes tournaments at a local casino and quickly realized the game was beatable. He switched to MTTs in 2012. “I have been friends with RLOG (pictured) for years,” the U.K. player said, “and definitely remember a conversation we had around the time of my WCOOP score where he convinced me to play more MTTs.”

He wanted to send a shout out to RLOG, Geraldo22, and Tomelwardy: “They have definitely been a big inspiration to me after all securing six-figure scores in recent months.”

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