sismis wins $900!

He played in a $2.5k guaranteed tournament on PartyPoker against 180 opponents and finished in second place!

After his success PokerStrategy interviewed the platinum member:

PokerStrategy: Who are you? Could you please introduce yourself?
sismis: My name is Jani. I come from Slovenia and am 25 years old. I am working in a bank and in addition I am finishing my computer science diploma (which is going very slow atm).

PokerStrategy: What kind of tournament did you play?
sismis: It was the $2.5k guaranteed $11 rebuy tournament on PartyPoker but the prize pool was much bigger ($5.4k). I used one rebuy and one add-on so I invested $31.

PokerStrategy: When did you start playing poker?
sismis: I started with real money games last year in November when i found a beautiful site called PokerStrategy.com 🙂 My first steps went ok but I won too little with the nuts and lost too much with marginal hands so I hardly made any profit. I was frustrated because things weren't going as expected and I finally lost my entire bankroll in february. I was gonna take a long break from poker but then my second chance came with a $20 birthday bonus from PartyPoker at the beginning of March. I used it for SNG's and increased my bankroll to 200$ by the end of March when it finally happened - i won 2875$ at a $6 rebuy. Of course a big downswing happened after this since my game was (still is) far from perfect, but in a month or so I managed to get my game stable enough again to make some constant profit.

PokerStrategy: Can you describe some decisive hands, the final hand and your thoughts?
sismis: I played pretty tight throughout the whole tournament. Playing like this is usually not enough to get so far but I managed to cash-in my strong hands very well. I was bellow average stack for most of the tournament until I doubled up with pocket aces against KJs (he pushed all-in preflop) when there were just 6 players left. After that me and the chipleader (later winner) just pushed the others around until we were heads up. At that stage he had 3 times more chips then me so I started very agressive and tried to force him into making mistakes. After couple of hands he was only twice as big as me but then I pushed with pocket 3's preflop and he had to call with his monster AK. He catched the king on the river and won the tourney.

PokerStrategy: How does it feel to win such a big prize?
sismis: It is my second biggest prize so I cannot tell that it never felt better. I am mostly happy because it is a nice shortcut to my goal for the end of the year: a $10k bankroll.

PokerStrategy: Congratulations and good luck at the tables!

-> "2nd place" thread by sismis