Breaking away from the field in the October 19 installment of the PokerStars Sunday Stormwas Costa Rica’s Robert PlayaPlz Lipkin (pictured), who chopped the tournament heads-up for $31,000. The Storm, as you probably know, attracts a bundle of players every week; in fact, the day Lipkin took it down, almost 37,000 showed up.

“I never thought that tournament was winnable,” he admitted. “There are so many people to get through with such short stacks.” He said the average stack was consistently around 15 to 20 big blinds, forcing players to make critical decisions at every turn. “I was playing my stack with steals and re-shoves and trying to chip up that way,” he explained. “Once it got down to the final few tables, everyone was playing pretty scared, so I was able to open up quite a bit.”

The minimum payout for reaching the final table was $1,600 for an $11 investment, while four players waked away with five-figures. On his massive-field strategy, he told us, “My strategy is to play very, very fast in the beginning and middle stages. I’m not interested in grinding a short stack in that tournament and, once you get chips, you can run over the tournament a bit. I want to make sure that when I’m deep in the Storm I have a big stack because of the edge you have versus all of the random players who are likely very scared.”

The Storm is the fourth largest cash we’ve tracked for Lipkin. He won the Sunday Warm-Up last year for a blistering $117,000 and final tabled an FTOPS event seven years ago to put away $99,000. He also made the semifinals of a SCOOP Heads-Up event in 2009 for $47,000.

His plans for his recent bankroll injection aren’t too exciting, but definitely practical. “I wish I had something cool to tell you,” he joked, “but I’m going to keep playing and will be going to EPT Prague and PCA, which are both coming up.” The two live tournaments take place in December and January, respectively.

As we mentioned, the PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up was his largest haul so far, but his FTOPS cash for almost six-figures helped his poker career take flight. “I was living at home at the time and it was a huge jump start to my career,” he said. “It definitely helped me get to where I am today. It gave me a bunch of money to be flexible with what games I enjoyed playing. I was playing $1-$2 and $2-$4 No Limit at the time and it allowed me to comfortably play $5-$10 and $10-$20.”

On the legacy of the Warm-Up in 2013, Lipkin commented, “That was very vindicating for me. I always played tournaments on the side when I wanted a break from cash games, but I started living with a bunch of tournament grinders and re-dedicated myself to learning them and studying them. The Warm-Up was really rewarding for all of the hard work I had put in.”

You can find Lipkin at #63 worldwide in the PocketFives Online Poker Rankings, his highest slotting ever, and #5 in the poker mecca of Costa Rica. He just passed $2.1 million in career online winnings.

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