On the second day of 2011, Nicolas PokerKaiserFierro (pictured) took down the PartyPoker $250,000 Guarantee.The Chilean poker player bested the field in the $215 buy-in tournament, which had a $263,000 prize pool up for grabs. Fierro walked away with $38,000 and, perhaps more importantly, got the new year started off on the right foot. He sits comfortably at #30 in the PocketFives.com Rankings, down one spot from last week. We caught up with the Santiago resident, who plays under the handle JokerzFull on PartyPoker, to learn more.

When four tables remained, Fierro told PocketFives.com that he diverted his attention to the PartyPoker $250,000 Guarantee. Until that point, he had been concentrating on a barrage of other windows and explained that the competition was pretty light: “Party’s fields are usually softer than on other sites, so I just kept my aggressive style, raising and stealing blinds in a lot of hands and 4betting light in some spots. I didn’t really have any big competition until the final table.”

At the final table, Fierro doubled up after flopping a boat and then betting into a player who was chasing a flush draw that ultimately hit on the river. Concurrently, he was deep in the $2,000 buy-in PartyPoker Super High Roller, which drew about 30 players. However, Fierro bubbled that tournament in fourth place, which caused a momentary dip in his performance in the $250,000 Guarantee.

He admitted, “I lost my focus for a while and dropped down from having a huge chip lead to being in the middle of the pack. In one hand, I lost a big pot against a guy who was 3betting and squeezing a lot. I shipped it in with pocket fours and he snapped with A-K and won the race. That hurt my stack quite a bit, so after that, I just tried to calm down and thought to myself that the only way to take off the bubble tilt was winning the tournament.”

Fierro is perhaps best known for taking second in a $1,060 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event during last April’s Full Tilt Online Poker Series(FTOPS) for nearly $200,000. Twenty days before that, he had taken down the PokerStars Super Tuesday for a $76,000 cash infusion. On his blockbuster year that was, Fierro told PocketFives.com, “I was very happy. It was my best year so far. I finally got that six-figure score I was looking for during the FTOPS and, besides that, I had nice results overall.”

On the live scene, Fierro final tabled the PokerStars Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) Grand Final for $25,000 in September. He placed fourth in a $1,000 No Limit Hold’em event during LAPT Lima for $35,000 in June and, last January, took 94th in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) Main Event.

Fierro is the top-ranked online poker player in Chile. We asked him to give us the scoop on the poker industry in the South American nation: “There are a lot of people who play, although there are very few who do it professionally. I’m one of the only MTT pros; the rest of the Chileans who play poker for a living play mostly cash. When I won the Super Tuesday, I received a lot of calls and e-mails asking for interviews and appeared in a few local newspapers. They couldn’t believe you could win that kind of money playing online.”

Fierro is now camped out at the PCA in the Bahamas and gave us his outlook for the coming calendar year: “I just hope this year is as good as or better than last year. I will go on playing more live tournaments looking for that big score. I was close last year and had some nice runs at the PCA and WSOP Main Event and had an LAPT Argentina final table.”

Sign up for PartyPoker today to enter this week’s running of the $250,000 Guarantee.