If you were looking for the optimal snowboarding environment, we’d imagine the frozen tundra of Siberia would be near the top of the list. The snowy Russian locale is home to PocketFiver Sergey Kalinovskiy, who is better known as Liveplzon our site. At the beginning of the month, he marched to a second place finish in the Full Tilt Poker Sunday Brawl and raked in $31,000.

“I was pleased with the score,” Kalinovskiy told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “It was the second spring in a row that I had such a nice score.” In March 2012, Kalinovskiy finished second in the PartyPoker $200,000 Guaranteed for $30,000 officially, giving him over $60,000 in earnings from the two March tournaments alone.

No deal was in store in the weekend’s Sunday Brawl. Why? Kalinovskiy explained, “My opponents did not want to give me a small amount, so we played on.” In the end, Full Tilt player gkap13came away with the $200,000 Guaranteed title and received a bankroll boost of $47,000.

Also at the final table were Casey bigdogpckt5sJarzabek (pictured), who finished in third place for $22,000, and Mossified84, who exited in ninth. We asked the Russian what it was like playing with these two longstanding members of the PocketFives community at the final table of a Sunday Major: “Mossified84 played a short stack and quickly took off after he ran into aces. bigdogpckt5s was playing hard across the table. He paid for it a little bit and also got unlucky on his last hand, which I was a little happy about.”

In Jarzabek’s final hand, he 3bet before the flop with queens and was up against A-J. He was sitting pretty until the river, when an ace cast him away in third. His exit left Kalinovskiy heads-up for at least $31,000.

As far as his plans for the money, Kalinovskiy told us that a portion will go to his bankroll, a portion will afford him what will likely be some much-deserve time off, and a portion will be earmarked for snowboarding. “I’ve ridden for four years,” he said of his love of the snow. “The places around here are not very good, but they exist. Since I live in Siberia, I can ride at my favorite ski resort, Sheregesh, which us the largest one here.”

Live poker is virtually non-existent in Russia due to legal issues, so Kalinovskiy and company have turned online. He told us, “Many Russian players transitioned smoothly to the poker scene. I did so back in 2005 and started living off my poker income in 2008.

In the first four months of 2012, Kalinovskiy won the PokerStarsBig $55 and $27 Saturday Eliminator for $21,000 and $11,000, respectively. He has $332,000 in tracked cashes to his name and is #2 in his hometown of Novosibirsk.

He closed by telling us, “I want to say thanks to Roman Matveichuk (MatveichukR on PocketFives). He is a good friend.” Matveichuk is ranked #77 worldwide and fifth in Russia. He has $1.3 million in lifetime tracked online poker MTT earnings to his credit.

Russia is #5 in the PocketFives Country Poker Rankingswith a combined PLB score of its top 20 players of 93,233. MAMOHT_T, who is #10 worldwide, is its top ranked player. See what’s going down in our Russia poker community.

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