The December 11th running of the $11 buy-in PokerStars Sunday Stormwas part of the site’s 10th anniversary celebration. The guaranteed prize pool of the Sunday Storm was upped to $1 million and at least $150,000 was allocated to the winner. After registration had closed, the tournament mustered an impressive field of 116,000 players and a $1.1 million prize pool. The Czech Republic’s Jakub Dobiáš (pictured), who goes by Sedrick here on PocketFives, survived to see a fifth place finish, which came with a bankroll boost of $32,000.

Dobiáš told us that he was thrilled to book his largest tracked cash to date: “I feel great. It was a long road to get this big score and finally, after a few major runs, I got it.” He sits at #441 in the PocketFives Rankingsand owns the eighth spot in the Sortable Rankings for his home nation, the Czech Republic.

Dobiáš explained that the weekly tournament gave out starting stacks of 5,000 and had a Turbo structure in which the price of poker went up every 10 minutes. Besides the prize pool, he had even more motivation to succeed: “I made a last longer bet on one Czech forum, but I played at the start the same way as I would in any other tournament. I had it hidden somewhere behind Sunday Major tournaments like the Million and Warm-Up. I started to take it seriously when I was one of the last two players standing in the last longer, somewhere around 2,000 remaining players. Then, my strategy was to play it with the least amount of variance.”

On his attention span in the Sunday Storm compared to other tournaments on his radar that day, Dobiáš told us, “Other Sunday Majors have more value than this one; this tournament looks a little bit like roulette.”

When the PocketFives Rankings were recalculated on December 14th, Dobiáš shot up nearly 400 spots. He now has his sights set even higher: “I like challenges. My coach, Vinkyy(pictured), is on the top of the leaderboard and I want to go higher too.” Vinkyy, whose real name is Ondrej Vinklarek, is also from the Czech Republic and can be found at #21 worldwide. He’s on the verge of recording his $2 million cash badge.

Dobiáš got his start in poker by learning the game in school. From there, he recalled, “I wanted to improve and so started reading some articles. When I was 18, I started playing online and participated in a Czech poker forum. I got coaching and last year at this time, I started grinding.”

You’ll recall that the ending of the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event saw Czech pro Martin Staszko(pictured) fall heads-up to Germany’s Pius Heinz. According to Dobiáš, Staszko’s run ignited a poker boom in the European country: “After Martin Staszko ended up second in the WSOP Main Event, he made poker very popular here. He is a very smart player and a very interesting man. He plays a very unorthodox style. The interesting thing is that when he goes from Las Vegas to Prague, he comes to the hotel from the airport by bus.” Staszko has since signed with PokerStars.

Other marquee scores by Dobiáš include a third place finish in the PokerStars $55 DNG Sunday Special for $19,000 in April just before Black Friday. On the first day of November, he was the runner-up in the Big $55 on PokerStars for $13,000. He has 637 tracked cashes on PocketFives and is batting about $367 apiece.

In the all-new PocketFives Country Poker Rankings, the Czech Republic is 18th. The top 20 players in the country have a combined PLB score of 51,988 points, about 800 ahead of the 19th ranked Netherlands. In terms of average PLB of all players in a country, the Czech Republic is fifth with an average score of 932 points.

Visit PokerStars for a complete recap of the site’s 10th anniversary celebration.