Weirdly, Mike "MikeyGG3" Gentili had a hunch he would win a TCOOP event this year. So much so that he'd told a friend a few days prior to the start. Somehow he just knew it.

We don't know how his friend reacted, but one thing was certain. Gentili wasn't kidding, and to prove it he won TCOOP-13 last Sunday for $24,298. I wonder what else he can predict?

"Obviously I wasn't expecting that coming in!" said Gentili. "I would have been happy to have made a final table even in one of the events."

It was the first COOP win for Gentili, from Canada, and if you were able to choose the fashion in which to win it, "wire to wire" would probably be right up there. In a game that prefers to punish and frustrate, it must have felt to Gentili like everything was going perfectly.

"Sums it up about right," he said. "With such an overwhelming chip advantage I was able to raise relentlessly and take down many pots with the short stacks all battling to out last one another."

That doesn't tell the full story. Gentili had the same challenges as everyone else on his way to the final, surviving countless all-ins and such. "Things just kind of fell into place," he said, credited his strong grasp of shoving and calling ranges as the single thing that helped him do well, something crucial in a tournament of a TCOOP structure.

But in his view the key moment was not anything that set up his win. It was the hand that sealed it, the final hand.

"Just spiking the eight on him (Ukrainian player po82m) heads-up and ending it there and taking down the championship, that was a really great moment for me."

Gentili admits to not spending as much time planning for TCOOP as for say SCOOP or WCOOP, but the effect seemed just the same. He plans a break after it's all over, but for now his attention is on the rest of the series.

"I'm gonna continue going hard this week till the end of TCOOP," he said. I'll be playing almost all events until the main as I have made a couple cashes and might actually have a shot at the series leader board if I were to close out this week strong."

Take note, his predictions have been right before.

You can check Gentili's progress on the TCOOP Leader Board here as the series inches towards the Main Event on Sunday. Find all the results so far on our TCOOP results page.