The second event of the ongoing UB.com Online Championship, or UBOC, was a $320 No Limit Hold’em Sniper Deep Stack contest that distributed a prize pool of nearly $250,000. KILLERJESS defeated PocketFives.com member Mark RenRad 01Darner (pictured) heads-up to take away $55,000, while Darner earned $33,000 for his second place finish. PocketFives.com caught up with Darner to rehash his score, which was his largest tracked for the Poker Rankings.

He told PocketFives.com that the $33,000 cash windfall would be used to cover his taxes and a car. Earlier in the day, he had recorded what was, for a few minutes at least, his largest score to date, a $30,000 jackpot for winning the Multi-Entry Fifty-Fifty on Full Tilt Poker. He admitted that despite recording his two largest online poker scores ever on the same day, he remained focused on playing cards: “I live by the motto of ‘Ride the Heaters,’ so when I win, I usually just keep playing rather than celebrate.” He also won the PokerStars Nightly Seventy Grand on January 19th for nearly $14,000.

Each bounty in the UBOC 6 Sniper tournament was worth $30, but Darner noted that the extra payout did not factor into his decision-making all that much: “When you’re playing for $55,000, you’re not really going to risk extra chips for a $30 bounty. I played a PCA tournament that had a $2,000 buy-in: $1,000 plus $1,000 bounties on everyone. That will change how you play slightly.”

Darner is a relative newcomer to the UB.com scene, having only played a handful of tournaments on the USA-friendly online poker site. “I’ve played fewer than 20 tournaments on UB, as I just started a few days ago,” he admitted. “I’ve been able to run it while I run PokerStars and Full Tilt without any problems and their structures are fine too. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with UB so far.”

Darner also took down one of the first multi-entry tournaments ever held on Full Tilt. The multi-entry format, which was born about a week ago, found its way to the site’s Fifty-Fifty. Darner gave us his take on the ability to buy in for multiple stacks in the same tournament: “It’s easy for me to say it’s awesome because I won one, but if they are going to do the multi-entry format, they need to keep it like it is: a few specific tournaments. The idea itself could hurt poker if they did it for all tournaments.”

He elaborated on the latter comment by arguing, “Who is going to want to play the $1K Monday with gboro780 (pictured) having four starting stacks? I think, especially in the higher buy-ins, it could make fields considerably tougher since most randoms aren’t going to buy in multiple times for the higher amount. The really good players are going to have their edge extended, but we always want to keep the randoms interested.” The “Multi-Fifty” boasted a generous prize pool of over $150,000.

The upcoming Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) features nine multi-entry tournaments, including the $640 Main Event. “I’m under the impression that you either don’t play it or play max entries,” Darner said about the FTOPS Main Event. “There’s no reason to buy in once and have everyone else with four stacks.”

Darner got his start in the game during a trip from Orlando to Atlanta for a few baseball games between the Braves and Red Sox. He reminisced, “I got home and started playing $5 home games with my friends. Eventually, I loaded my first $50 onto PartyPoker and won my first ‘big’ tournament on PokerStars. It was a $20 180-man event that paid $1,080 for first. It helped pay for my first semester of college.”

His friend and fellow community member Rat Sauce 89taught him the game from there after crushing sit and gos online. Darner quit his job at Blockbuster last January and promptly played 50,000 tournaments on PokerStars in 2010 for 700,000 VPPs. He landed in eighth place on the PokerStars TLB despite not turning in a score over $20,000. Now, he lives with Rat Sauce 89, PeachesForMe, and Marty TheLipoFundMathis in Orlando.

Visit UB.comfor more details on UBOC 6 and head to Full Tilt to try your hand at multi-entry tournaments.