There’s always a story behind a player’s screen name. For some, it’s a nickname given to them as a kid. For others, it’s based on their favorite sports team or athlete. For a few we’ve talked to, it’s an homage to their home country. For Paul padjesBerende (pictured), it’s the following, as he narrated to us: “A friend of mine came up with it a long while ago when we just starting playing poker and he was always lucky. So, I used it on PokerStars hoping I would be lucky as well.” The word actually means a frog or toad.

We caught up with Berende after he was one-half of a heads-up chop of the PokerStars Sunday 500 last month. He officially took second place for $58,000, while fellow PocketFives member pablito_21 came away with the win and $62,000. “When it was three-handed, I didn’t want to deal because I thought it would be better to play and maybe make a deal heads-up,” Berende said of his mentality.

By the time heads-up play rolled around, it was 9:30 in the morning in his homeland of the Netherlands. “I was pretty exhausted,” Berende said, “so we decided to look at the numbers. We agreed on a deal were I got a little extra than the chip-chop numbers, so that was fine by me. We still had $6,000 left to play for and the guy I was heads-up with asked me if I wanted to do a mandatory 3bet every hand to make it less deep. Because I was so exhausted and didn’t feel like playing two more hours, I agreed on the mandatory 3bet and we got it in after three or four hands with pair versus pair.”

Berende has nearly $3 million in tracked online cashes. After all of that winning, does he still revel in the glory of five-figure paydays or is it just another day at the office? He told us, “It gives me a little more satisfaction to win this kind of tournament than, say, the Big $11 because it’s more of a challenge mentally and you play against a lot of tougher opponents. I don’t really get used to it. It’s an awesome feeling every time you get deep.”

The final table of the Sunday 500 that week also featured the likes of s_dot111and Bianconero12 (pictured), who finished in fourth place and seventh place, respectively. We asked Berende for his thoughts on the other PocketFivers who joined him deep: “I have a lot of respect for s_dot111’s game. He has proven in the past that he can crush MTTs over a long period of time. The other two guys were playing okay as well. I think Bianconero12 was short most of the time I played with him, so he couldn’t really get anything going. pablito_21 had a couple of light re-shoves, which I didn’t agree with, but besides that, he showed he was capable of playing back, so he didn’t make it easy for me.”

Berende took down a PokerStars Turbo Championship of Online Poker $109 Cubed tournament in January for $115,000 officially and has four tracked scores of at least $50,000. We asked him what else he’d like to accomplish in the poker world: “Everybody wants a major title like an EPT or WSOP bracelet, so that speaks for itself. But, I just want to have fun in poker for as long as it lasts. For as long as I can get enough satisfaction out of it, I will keep playing.”

We also asked Berende whether poker was still “fun,” as he referred to it, or if it had become more of a job. He remarked, “I still have a lot of fun playing. I really like the combination of grinding online for a while and then having a trip to some live series. I have to admit I sometimes get a little bored on the first day of live tournaments because there are so many pots which you are not involved in or that are just not interesting, which makes it a long time to sit on one table for a day. I am a little bit of a talker at the table, so I try to have some fun here and there to make it a little less boring.”

He added, “I couldn’t play cash games for as many hours as I do tournaments. It seems way more exhausting and feels way more like work for me than tournaments.”

If you don’t already have a PokerStars account, you can sign up through PocketFives’ link and make a deposit to get one free month of PocketFives MTT Training. You’ll also get a 100% up to $600 sign-up bonus. Click here for PocketFives’ PokerStars link.

Want the latest poker headlines and interviews? Follow PocketFives on Twitterand Like PocketFives on Facebook. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed.