Last weekend, the Ongame $200,000 Guaranteed attracted 1,359 players. The $190 No Limit Hold’em tournament shoveled out more than a quarter-million dollars, about one-sixth of which went to Australia’s Kristopher ibluffheapsCunz (pictured), who walked away with $44,000. He was the lone member of the PocketFives community to make the final table of the $200K, which you can find on sites like Betsafe.

“I had a pretty slow year in 2012, so to start this year with a bang feels great,” Cunz told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “The tournament has a fantastic structure, the best of all of the Majors, I think. This is slightly offset by the fact that it’s 10-handed, but once you’re down to the final three tables and the play gets short-handed, things start to heat up and it becomes a lot of fun.” We’d consider raking in $44,000 “a lot of fun” too.

He hasn’t had a ton of success in Ongame’s $200K, but noted that he has recorded a few in the money finishes in the network’s $100 Cubed, which carries a $100,000 guarantee. “I don’t have anything major planned for the money,” he told us. “I tend to do a lot of traveling, and with Australian WSOP events coming up and the WSOP in Las Vegas not long after that, I’m sure the money will find a new home shortly.”

Cunz is a member of the Queensland poker community in Australia and explained that poker is a bit overlooked in his homeland: “I’d say it goes under the radar for most people even though there is a strong pub poker and casino scene. Most recreational players still seem a bit wary of internet poker and with how Black Friday hit the headlines, who can blame them?”

It was interesting to hear an Australian say that Black Friday, which centered on the U.S. online poker market thousands of miles away, had a noticeable impact. “I’d say for many it broke what trust they had in the sites and for many more it may have been the first thing they ever heard about online poker,” Cunz said of the U.S. Department of Justice’s crackdown on PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Absolute. “But you know what? Poker is such a fun, challenging, and social game that in the long-run, it won’t matter much.”

Cunz got started in poker as part of a free pub game and fell in love with it. “Poker, if you let it, can teach you a lot,” he said. “For one thing, it teaches you a sort of mental toughness: to learn enough that you can be confident in the expectation of a decision regardless of the outcome. In a way, you’re playing against yourself, as you can be constantly rewarded for bad decisions just as you are punished for good ones. But, if you keep your head together and focus on that which you can control, you will be rewarded.”

Cunz rather bluntly called himself a “maniac since the day I started playing.” However, he has toned it down as of late: “A lot of my aggression was misplaced early on. It was my brother, partyhair, who really taught me to use that to my advantage by switching gears to manipulate my opponents’ expectations.”

He continued, “The best advice I ever got about poker was from the brother of Derek8 (pictured), a well-known tournament and satellite player from a few years ago. When I asked him, ‘How does your brother make so much money so consistently,’ he said, ‘Three things: volume, volume, and volume.’ That really stuck with me.”

We should probably point out that Cunz has over $1.5 million in tracked cashes in online MTTs in his profile and is #2 in Queensland. He joined PocketFives one day before this author’s birthday in 2007.

By the way, if you don’t already have a Betsafe account, you can sign up for the home of the Ongame $200K through PocketFives’ links and make a deposit to get two free months of PocketFives Training with the sign-up fee waived, a $100 value. Get started here.

Want the latest poker headlines and interviews? Follow PocketFives on Twitterand Like PocketFives on Facebook. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed.