Last Thursday night, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner added a second Triple Crown to his already impressive resume of tournament success. PearlJammer started things off on 3/30 with a win on Bodog worth 3.5k, and a few days later, he followed it up with another win on Pokerstars for 4.3k. He entered the Full Tilt Poker 40k Guaranteed on Thursday night a mere three hours before his first win would be a week old and thus expire for Triple Crown purposes. When the last card fell, he had all the chips and the Triple Crown was his. That win was worth $12.4k, and the three together totaled over $20,000. <READMORE>

Pearljammer is in very good company in terms of Pocketfivers who have achieved the Triple Crown twice. Those to get there before him were Annette_15, Ari, Colson10, JohnnyBax, TheBeat, and Gator93, but only the first three did so under the current rules of the Triple Crown. Whether it’s harder to final table three tourneys in 24 hours or win three in 7 days is a question I’ll leave for someone else to answer. What I do know is for the past five weeks he has been absolutely crushing MTTs.

Since March 1st PearlJammer has 27 cashes in the tournaments we track for rankings purposes. Out of those 27, 24 were final tables, 11 were top three and 8 were wins! Two of the three tournaments he missed the final table were big Sunday buy-ins where he went out in the last 2-3 tables. That, my friends, is what we like to call dominance. Granted, he puts in his fair share of volume, but in any tournament in which he got a few chips together he put them to very, very good use. With eight wins in five weeks, the only thing that surprises me is that PearlJammer didn’t win a Crown sooner.

When asked about the three wins, the only one that stood out as particularly special was the last one. The Full Tilt big buy-in tourneys are stocked with talented players and the 40k last week was no exception. The final table started with Tmay420, The_Toilet, and PearlJammer holding 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chips stacks. As if the other six guys weren’t already hurting, up against such strong opposition.

PearlJammer and The_Toilet went heads up for the win, and The_Toilet had him outchipped 2-1. Jon doubled through when his JJ survived a race against AK, which gave him a slight edge, but the rest of the match took the better part of an hour. When I asked him if that was unusual for him online, he replied, “I get into long heads up matches a fair amount. I try to play small pot poker against most opponents and often (but not always), the stacks are pretty deep relative to the blinds in tourneys I win.”

PearlJammer went on to say, “I played Huck Seed heads up in the $100 6-max $30k on FTP about 2 weeks ago. I had a big lead when we began, but he crawled back to dead even after about 45 minutes. He then asked for a 50/50 chop. I knew he was tired, but he was playing his ‘A’ game, and he was definitely outplaying me. I couldn’t turn down a 50/50 chop with one of the best heads up players in the world.”

Since the explosion in poker’s popularity I don’t know if there is such a thing as the “typical” poker player anymore, but I’m pretty sure Jon Turner isn’t it. He grew up in a pretty conservative family, did well in school and went to college before he played a single hand of poker. “I didn’t even know what beat what before the 2003 WSOP aired on ESPN, so yeah, I’d have to say Moneymaker got me started,” Jon said of the bait that lured him into the world of poker. So we have another talented player to thank (or blame) Chris Moneymaker for.

Back then Jon ran a small game that spread 1-2, or 2-4 NL. He didn’t make anything off of running the game, but his guests were leaving his house between 3 and 4K lighter each week, so his move to Vegas in 2005 was not exactly a rash decision. He started out well, beating 2/5 and 5/10 NL, just grinding it out. He began playing a few of the Bellagio tournaments and then did well in a WSOP event. In the Fall of 2005 he discovered online MTTs and he was hooked.

I asked PearlJammer to tell me what was the most common mistake the average player makes and how he would correct it. I just can’t pass up the opportunity to pick the brain of a great player a little bit, now can I? He came up with this response,

“There is definitely no easy answer. Perhaps the most common mistake average players make is being too focused on cashing as a measure of their success. They may know the importance of making it to the final table in regards to the payout ladder, yet the desire to show a profit on each individual tournament often clouds their judgment. Although this concept primarily manifests itself in bubble play, it is also applicable to middle stages of tourneys.

“Players who are scared to take known gambles because their edge isn't big enough to risk their precious "tournament life" are often missing out on their 50/50 chance to have a huge stack and dominate their table. That is especially with the bubble approaching. If you want to make any money in MTTs, you have to get top-three money. That’s the bottom line.”

John Turner’s parents were very skeptical of his chosen career at first, but they have come around after seeing his tremendous success and the enjoyment he gets out of the game. Pearljammer makes it a point to see his online namesake in concert several times a year and he plays a bit of guitar himself. He is also a huge movie buff, with over 800 DVDs in his collection. His favorite is 2001: A Space Odyssey and he is a big Kubrick fan in general. He had the pleasure of taking a class on Kubrick as part of a Film minor in college. A less well known flick he really enjoys is Bound, one of the first films by the Wachowski brothers.

I asked PearlJammer if he thought he would still be playing today if one of his home games had been raided back in Raleigh (as there have been some busts since then). He didn’t hesitate a moment before saying with a laugh, “For sure. Almost as soon as I discovered poker, I became addicted. Thankfully it is an addiction that allows me to make a pretty good living!”

A pretty good living indeed. Keep killing it Jon, we enjoy watching.
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