The newest Triple Crown winner on PocketFives.com is a transplant from London, England who now resides halfway around the world in Tauranga, New Zealand. Neil theVisionary Mcfayden took down the Titan Poker $50,000 Guaranteed Super Tuesday on November 18th for $13,500. The next day, he secured the second leg of his Triple Crown quest by winning the $20,000 European Rebuy on PokerRoom. On November 23rd, he won the $10,000 Guaranteed Speed tournament on PartyPoker, solidifying his name on the Triple Crown Wall of Champions. PocketFives.com virtually traveled to New Zealand to speak with Mcfayden just a few days removed from his accomplishment.
Triple Crowns mean different things to different people. Some members of the online poker community that we’ve interviewed don’t even know that they won. Some are overly elated. Mcfayden told PocketFives.com, “I guess it means I’ve had a good week, but it’s also a form of recognition, which is nice because poker can be a bit of a grind at times. I know there are lots of people on PocketFives that want to win a Triple Crown. Once you win two events, it gives you the extra push to put in more volume.”
You’ll notice that none of Mcfayden’s victories came on sites that accept U.S. players. In other words, online poker rooms Full Tilt Poker, Ultimate Bet, Absolute Poker, Bodog, and PokerStars are noticeably absent. One of his roommates in New Zealand, PocketFiver mathclub, also took home a Triple Crown on November 21st using the same three sites as Mcfayden did. In fact, they were the first PocketFivers to achieve a Triple Crown without using a tournament on Full Tilt Poker or PokerStars since busto_soon won events on Bodog, UB, and Party in October of 2007. Mcfayden noted, “It is much easier for non-U.S. players. I play on about nine different sites.”
His toughest leg of the Triple Crown was the $100 rebuy, $50,000 Guaranteed on Titan Poker. He recalled, “I was short most of the final table, but iPoker is very different than PokerStars and Full Tilt. It’s tighter and people will raise quite a large portion of their stacks and then fold to a re-shove, so I try to exploit that. I will often re-shove on people despite not appearing to have much fold equity.” Titan Poker is a site on the iPoker Network.
The $20,000 Guaranteed European Rebuy on PokerRoom came with a $20 price tag and included rebuys, meaning that two of his three Triple Crown tournament victories came in rebuy events. Mcfayden explained, “I don’t mind gambling and rebuying in order to get lots of chips early. People overvalue hands in those tournaments, so I don’t mind racing with them early. I don’t play differently during the rebuy period; I just push hands harder.”
He got his start in poker by catching it on television. He added, “I was coaching soccer in North Carolina at the time and went across to Las Vegas.” He began playing online and the rest, as they say, is history. Now, he’s a native of New Zealand, where he has lived for the past three months after moving from London. He told PocketFives.com, “I moved here so I could play poker in the mornings, not in the evenings. There are three of us in the same house on the beach.” He usually plays from 7:00am to 3:00pm daily.
The beachfront home on New Zealand’s North Island houses the top three ranked PocketFivers in the country according to Sliding PLB score: Mcfayden, Neil Puggy82 Stewart, and mathclub. Each member of the trio holds a Triple Crown title. Mcfayden noted, “It’s not always as good as it sounds. There is a lot of cursing, particularly from mathclub. He’s the local guy and we met him on PocketFives. Stewart was from Scotland originally and I knew him from college. He posted on PocketFives to ask where we should go to improve our poker schedule and mathclub replied.”
Mcfayden’s poker resumé includes a three-way chop in the $1 Million May Madness on PartyPoker earlier this year for $156,000. In tournaments that are tracked for the PocketFives.com Online Poker Rankings, he’s piled up over $40,000 already in November thanks to his Triple Crown win. He plans to spend eight months out of the year in New Zealand, one month in Las Vegas, and then head back home for the remaining three months.
Congratulations from all of us at PocketFives to Neil theVisionary Mcfayden, our newest Triple Crown winner.
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