Earlier this month, Portugal’s Tiago tiago_diasDias (pictured, image courtesy PokerPT) finished in third place in the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl. There were slightly more than 600 entrants that week and Dias’ deep run was worth $13,000, bringing his lifetime total to nearly $800,000 in online tournaments. “I’m feeling very good,” Dias told PocketFives. “I feel I am playing my best game.”

Fourteen of Dias’ 15 largest online poker scores have occurred this year, including a win in a WCOOP Second Chance tournament last month for $40,000. On his resoundingly successful 2014, Dias remarked, “I’m having a great year with many good results. The WCOOP Second Chance was my best result this year. I have improved my game a lot by talking with friends and grinding, mostly with Jose gotocashier Quintas. I owe much to him. Almost everything I know about poker today I learned from him.”

What changed in 2014? Did the light bulb go on? “I don’t play a lot,” he said, “only when I have online competitions like the WCOOP, SCOOP, FTOPS, Winamax series, and others. I try to play shorted sessions with a good selection of tournaments. I play a maximum of 18 tables at the same time to be able to focus on my game and my opponents. I also upgraded my equipment; it’s very important to be comfortable while you’re playing.”

He doesn’t have any lavish plans for the money. Instead, he’ll likely traverse the Atlantic Ocean to the Bahamas in January for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. The rest will become part of his online bankroll because, as he put it, “No one knows what will happen tomorrow, so I prefer to save money rather than spend it.”

Dias is one of 1,075 PocketFivers from Portugalwith PLB scores. He sits at #8 in the Western European nation and is #2 in the coastal city of Espinho. “We have a big poker community in Portugal,” Dias said. “There are many people playing live, but the big Portuguese pros opt to play live outside of Portugal. Many people in Portugal don’t view poker too kindly. They don’t view the game as being a profession.”

Portugal is #12 in the PocketFives Country Rankingswith a combined PLB score of its top 20 players of 83,213 points. Dias owns one of the country’s seven PocketFives Triple Crowns and has been a member of PocketFives since 2012.

When Dias was 20, he started playing with friends in home games. He told us, “Any time I won, I invested the money online. In the beginning, I didn’t know the game very well, played what I felt like, and didn’t care much about bankroll management and other important things in poker. When I started to get interested in the game and felt I could be successful, I decided to focus more on it.”

At the same time, he started hanging around with friends who had more poker experience than he did in order to soak up strategy like a sponge. He has played professionally for three years and attributes his success nowadays to hard work, post-game analysis, and discussion.

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