Last weekend, Sweden’s Yaya24came away with the win in the Microgaming €100,000 Guaranteed. The weekly tournament, which takes place on sites like 32Red, drew 485 players in its last go-around and 50 finished in the money. If you’ve never played in the event, it’s a €110 No Limit Hold’em Rebuy, and Yaya24’s reward for coming away with the victory in it was €25,000. He bluntly admitted in an exclusive interview with PocketFives, “To win a big Sunday tournament is always a big deal.”

Our interview subject hails from Sweden and has nearly $1 million in tracked cashes to his name. He debuted in the top 100 of the PocketFives Poker Rankingslast week at #62 worldwide and gave us the inside scoop on the big-time tournament he took down: “The field is a lot softer than in the big PokerStars tournaments. It’s a tournament that is pretty easy to build a big stack in and you can take advantage of the softer competition.”

He added, “Later on, the structure gets pretty steep, so it ends up being more or less a crapshoot when the final table approaches. That was when I had to bring my great running skills and suck out on half of the final table.” The tournament frequently sports an overlay to boot.

He plays on 32Red under the handle ChuckRunkleand edged out rasande0kseheads-up. As we said before, the Microgaming €100,000 Guaranteed is a rebuy, so we asked Yaya24 to talk about how he handles the first few levels: “I don’t go crazy during the rebuy period or anything, but in this one, I like to gamble a little bit more just to get a stack since you can really use a big stack well. But last week, I don’t think I was in for any extra rebuys. I remember I managed to get a really good stack without them.”

In February, Yaya24 won the PokerStars Sunday Supersonic for $41,000, his largest tracked score to date. He’s up to nearly $400,000 in winnings on PokerStars alone and said that he has made it a point to improve his game: “In the last six months, I have really worked hard on my game. I have a group that discusses a lot of poker and often sits together and plays. They are some really good and helpful players, so that has really contributed to my recent success.”

Other top scores for the Swedish pro include a win in a $100 buy-in tournament on bwin for $25,000 last November and a runner-up finish in late March in the €200 Sunday Six-Max on PokerStars’ French site for $10,000. Just a few weeks prior to his PokerStars.fr score, he captured victory in the PokerStars $100 Rebuy for $11,000 and won the Hot $16.50 on the world’s largest online poker room for another $10,000.

We associate Sweden with poker pro Viktor Isildur1 Blom (pictured) and ABBA, but Yaya24 told us, “Two Swedish players I really admire are Mr.Dawweand eisenhower1. They have been in the game a really long time and are still doing great. Another one is VnilaVader. He has a different approach to the game than most players and he’s doing really well. He has not grinded tournaments for very long, but he already has great success. He has to be the one of the most annoying players to be up against.”

Recent two-time Triple Crownwinner inhooleads the Sliding PLB for Sweden at the time of writing with a score of 6,710, while the runner-up, VnilaVader, trails by about 600 points. The former is #18 worldwide in the PocketFives Rankings, and the latter is at #32. Meanwhile, Yaya24 can be found at #5 in his home nation.

Finally, we asked Yaya24 what he does away from the virtual felts: “I was playing a lot of sports and studying marketing before. Now, I’m in a phase where I don’t want to do much else. I travel a little bit, but most of the trips are poker-related.”