After Swedish poker queen Sofia Lövgren final tabled 888poker’s flagship tournament for the second time this past weekend, she’s ready to take on Sin City.

The “Whale” is the biggest buy-in Sunday Major on 888poker with a buy-in of $1,050 and a guaranteed prize pool of $150,000.

Last weekend 121 players bought in to build a prize pool of $168,000 and a first-place prize of $38k.

888pker ambassador Sofia Lövgren came as close as you can to claiming that first prize but after almost nine hours of play succumbed to Swiss winner fishermen90.

Lövgren Harpoons the Whale

It was a very tough tournament with highly skilled players at the tables – Dominik ‘888Dominik’ Nitsche, Parker ‘888Tonkaaaa’ Talbot, Jonathan ‘Monster_dong’ Karamalikis, anteen, Gr33nApples, Nicolas ‘PKaiser’ Fierro, Graftekkel, Trollkonst8 and other 888 regulars were all there.

It was a motivating experience for the enigmatic Swede, who now feels ready to take on the 2017 World Series of Poker. 888poker caught up with her yesterday.

Big result heading into Vegas.

888: Why did you decide to sign up for this tournament? What’s special? 

Sofia Lövgren: The Whale is one of my favorite Sunday tournaments online. It recently got a new structure 2 weeks ago and I decided to check it out, and I like it!

It’s highly competitive with the best online tournament players combined with qualifiers. Makes for really fun poker with lots of 3-betting, 4-betting and mind games!

888: What is your deepest run for this tourney?

SL: 2nd place is my deepest run in The Whale, and I have placed 4th before too. I have yet to win it! Hopefully next week, ha!

888: What was the biggest or most important hand for you from the tournament? Please describe it for us and tell us why it was such a game changer!

SL: One really important hand where I got lucky was with A9 vs JJ, where I got trip nines on the river and on the bubble for a big double up!

Then another important hand was early in the tournament where I got a full house with pocket 4s on a T3s4sQ3 board where I made a big over bet on the river to get called by KT to boost my stack.

888: Who was the player you felt like you needed to worry from the most in the late stages?  

SL: There were 2 big stacks at the final table (fishermen90 and pullztrigger) and they had most of the chips while 4 others were very short stacked.

I had a stack in between and tried to avoid the big stacks at the beginning of the final table since I didn’t want any flipping or cooler situation vs a big stack.

I was cognizant of ICM with the short stacks still in. Fishermen90 played very well and was the big chip leader most of the final table, keeping pressure on all players. He was 4-1 chip lead into heads up and I didn’t manage to catch up to him.

Due for deep run in Main?

888: What’s next in your plans? Next tourney, cash-game? 

SL: I’m playing lots of live cash games lately in Macau and plan to do so for the next 10 days before flying to Vegas for WSOP. Most of the Sundays I play online tourneys as preparation for WSOP.

I plan to play around 10 WSOP NLHE Events, starting from the 24th of June with the WSOP Monster Stack and then finishing with the WSOP Main Event!

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If you want to play in the main event, too, take your shot at qualifying on 888poker. There are several ways to qualify but time is running out!

If you’d like to play this Thursday’s exclusive PokerListings $22 qualifier for a $3,000 WSOP trip to play the $888,888 Crazy Eights, create your own 888poker account here!