Last month, the Ongame Network, which includes sites like bwin, held its Grand Slam Final, a massive $5,000 buy-in tournament that attracted just shy of 200 players and shelled out a total prize pool of $896,000. The top 26 players made the money, among them Roman Romanovskyi (pictured), better known on PocketFives as Romeopro. His fifth place finish was good for $57,000, which he’ll take back to the Ukraine poker community.

“It’s a $5,000 tournament, so I was expecting a pretty tough field, but on the other side, it was Ongame, where there are usually pretty weak fields, so I decided to play it,” Romanovskyi told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. The Ongame player 23905806 walked away with the title and booked a $203,000 payday.

What can you expect the next time a $5,000 tournament rolls around on Ongame? We asked Romanovskyi to talk about the structure of the Grand Slam Final as well as a few key spots that came up: “The start of the tournament was very nice. After two hours, I had 37,000 with an average stack of 10,700. The starting stack was 10,000. I was one of the chip leaders for three hours and hit some unlucky spots, but I was sitting at a pretty weak table, which gave me the opportunity to make some good plays on the bubble.”

Once the top 20 rolled around, Romanovskyi became card dead, “but the field was really good. The whole time until the final table, I had a stack that was above average. The structure was pretty bad because the average stack in the top 20 was 30 to 35 big blinds, which isn’t very appropriate for a $5,000 tournament.”

There are 211 Ukrainian members of PocketFives who have recorded cashes for our Poker Rankings, and Romanovskyi sits at #2 in his home country. He is the lone PocketFiver from Khmelnitskiyand told us, “In the Ukraine, poker is not as popular as it is in the United States or Russia. However, there are a lot of poker venues here because in Russia, poker is forbidden, so all of the Russian poker series run in the Ukraine.” Many of the live series stop in Kiev, the capital city of the Ukraine.

In our Country Poker Rankings, the Ukraine (pictured) is #15 worldwide, sandwiched between Austria and Finland. “I would say the average player in the Ukraine is one of the strongest in the world, especially compared to the average player in Russia or the United States. In those countries, the game is popular and there are a lot of bad players,” Romanovskyi evaluated. “In the Ukraine, we have a very small percentage of bad players. I would compare Ukrainian players to those in countries like Belarus, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.”

Romanovskyi started playing after seeing “Poker After Dark” on television. He rifled through Google looking for an offer and ultimately found PokerStrategy. “I started to play cash games and sit and gos originally,” he told us, “but those weren’t as fun as MTTs. The competitive spirit of MTTs is unreal. I like them so much, but on the other side of the coin, MTTs can be the most disappointing discipline in poker. When you bust in 10th place from a major tournament, it’s super disappointing and really hard to get over. But, if you’re ready to handle it, MTTs can be the best poker discipline to play.”

For the first six months of his poker journey, he ran into a few headaches and turned a small profit after playing about 1,500 MTTs. Then, he won two tournaments in a single day that resulted in a profit of five times his bankroll, so he decided to take up the game while in school. “Now, I’m a professional poker player,” Romanovskyi relayed, “but really, we shouldn’t make poker our profession for our entire lives. We should at least try to find some other source of income too.”

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