One of our most recent online poker Triple Crownwinners, Matthew mstark87Stark (pictured), took down the 888 Poker$10,000 Guaranteed R&A Turbo, PartyPoker $15,000 Guaranteed, and iPoker €8,000 Guaranteed Rebuy en route to victory. It was his second career Triple Crown and, interestingly enough, all six of his Triple Crown tournament victories have come on just three sites.

Follow professional sports tipsters, make your own betting tips, and compete for real cash prizes. Tipdayis the ultimate sports tipping resource. Check it out.

It feels good to back the first one up with a second,” Stark said of his latest Triple Crown. “I won two tournaments on Sunday and it was pretty clutch to finish it off during the week.” Stark added that he only recently began playing on PokerStars, but prefers the smaller fields and lower variance of the “Euro” sites.

He told PocketFives that winning the 888 Poker $10K Turbo during his first Triple Crown was the most challenging of his six qualifying wins so far: “I didn’t realize until the morning of that tournament that I had a Triple Crown up for grabs. It was the seventh day and I didn’t plan on grinding that day. Some buddies of mine were over and I was like, ‘I need to do this.’ Somehow after mashing buttons for four hours, I came out on top.”

Moving away from the Triple Crown, the highlight of Stark’s poker career thus far is finishing second in a Main Event at Foxwoods last year for $36,000. “My wife is from Connecticut,” Stark explained, “so while she was visiting family in the US, I figured I’d hit up the casino since there’s nothing to play online.”

The New Zealand resident strictly plays MTTs. He started out in poker playing cash games, but turned to MTTs and has never looked back. It’s a far cry from his days hunting a professional tennis career, as he told us, “My whole life, I grew up wanting to be the best tennis player in the world. I’d train six hours a day, six days a week. Everything revolved around tennis.”

However, a tennis career wasn’t meant to be. “When I was around 21 and had been playing a few years on tour, I made an honest decision and realized I didn’t have what it took going forward to make it,” Stark said. “It was a pretty depressing time for me personally, as that dream had come to an end. A couple of years later around 2010, a friend of mine introduced me to poker. The idea of winning tournaments and outlasting everyone came naturally to me and got my blood flowing again.”

As he bluntly put it, “I was teaching tennis at the time and, at the end of 2012, I said, ‘The heck with it, let’s do poker full-time.'”

At this point in the interview, we were keen to know how proficient of a tennis player Stark was. Would he have been the next Pete Sampras? “I was a very good junior in the under-18s,” Stark told us, “but I just never really transitioned my game at the senior level. Tennis is such a tough sport in the sense that unless you are in the top 100 in the world, you aren’t making any money. So, you grind through the lower ranks and, for the most part, you end up in third-world countries chasing ranking points and staying in $10 a night hotels all alone. It takes its toll after a while.”

Stark is nearing $700,000 in tracked online MTT scores in his PocketFives profile, with the top three contributing sites being 888, iPoker, and PartyPoker. He is the sixth-ranked player in the New Zealand poker community and #1 in the hamlet of Hamilton.

He wanted to send shout outs to Tyson tyson219Ford, Doug OU_dlanger610 Lang, Jeff R.J_LegitTopol, and Howie No Name Fame Shen “for all of the help they have given me over the last few years with my game. I also want to thank the New Zealand poker community.” Finally, he wanted to thank his wife “for cooking for me while I sit at the desk in my boxers playing a card game for a living.” Now that’s vivid!

Check out our Triple Crown Wall of Champions to learn how to win your own award!

Want the latest poker headlines and interviews? Follow PocketFives on Twitterand Like PocketFives on Facebook. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed.