By
Dan |
Published
Oct 17 2008, 10:36 AM
Winning one Triple Crown is difficult enough. In order to capture this poker accolade, a person must win three multi-table tournaments in a seven-day period across any three sites that PocketFives.com tracks for its Online Poker Rankings. Each tournament must have a prize pool of at least $10,000 as well as a field of 100 or more. Satellites don’t count, which makes winning any tournament that counts for the Triple Crown an extremely profitable endeavor. This week, PocketFiver Jeremy Chipsteela Menard (ranked #65 worldwide) took down his fifth Triple Crown, tying Chris Moorman1 Moorman for the most ever. We sat down with Menard to talk about his roller coaster ride to win his third leg.
Menard’s quest for a Triple Crown began on Tuesday, October 7th. He won the $50 cubed on PokerStars and banked $6,939. He told PocketFives.com, “Usually when I win one tournament, I start to think if I actually want to put in the volume to try to win a Triple Crown.” On Monday, October 13th, Menard won the second leg of his Triple Crown, the $130 buy-in Sniper $30K Guaranteed on Ultimate Bet, cashing for $8,151.
He was left with one day to score his third tournament victory and decided to head to the virtual felts of Full Tilt Poker: “Usually with less then a day to go, a Triple Crown is not the easiest to pull it out, but since the one site I had left was Full Tilt Poker, I figured I'd just register for everything worth playing until 5:00pm to see if I could make it happen. Full Tilt has such a great daily tournament schedule with pretty weak fields.”
He played the $50 cubed on Full Tilt in his first attempt to win the Triple Crown on Tuesday. He talked about his ride through that event: “I ended up running pretty well in it and won a key race on the final table bubble to go into it as the chip leader with no regulars left in the field. Four-handed, I had a substantial chip lead then lost a huge race and ran into a cooler on the very next hand. I ended up entering heads-up play as a significant dog in chips and got second.” Although he failed to capture the Triple Crown in the $50 cubed, he pocketed $3,527 for his runner up finish.
He had a deep run in the $20 rebuy shortly afterwards, but lost a race and finished 17th, cashing for $141. Menard then made the final table of the $100 rebuy, $40,000 Guaranteed on Full Tilt, but finished in third, nearly nabbing his fifth career Triple Crown. On the $100 rebuy’s final table, he commented, “Gboro780 was knocking people out left and right. Every time I looked back at the table, someone else was gone. I have a lot of respect for his game and he obviously ended up winning.”
Menard registered at the last minute for the $120 buy-in $30,000 KO Guarantee, a tournament that he doesn’t normally play, but wanted to give it a shot anyway. He won a huge pot off fellow PocketFiver Mossified84 to gain the chip lead entering final table play. Menard explains the significance of the movement in chips: “That was a vital pot because he was chip leader and he’s definitely capable of using his stack to exploit the table. I think losing that pot handcuffed him because he no longer had a stack where he could really play back at me when we got to the final table.”
The timely decision to enter the $30,000 KO Guarantee proved to be the difference-maker for Menard, who used his dominant chip stack to his advantage at the final table. He joins third-ranked Moorman as the only PocketFivers ever to win five Triple Crowns. So what does it mean to be a Triple Crown winner on the site? Menard explains, “It means that you have to be a pretty consistent player who knows how to play against opponents on the different sites. Believe it or not, there are subtle differences that you have to be aware of as far as player tendencies and also tournaments across different online poker rooms.” He added, “Winning a Triple Crown also means that you have the discipline to maintain a high level of play while competing in many tournaments at once, since volume is the key to being able to ship a Triple Crown.”
Although the number of Triple Crowns has blurred together for Menard, he knows that he’s gotten the attention of Moorman: “I have so much respect for Moorman's game, but he should know that he’s going down in the race for the Triple Crown record. After the first one, it’s not quite as exciting, but it definitely still feels good to know that you’re playing well consistently and getting the results to prove it.”
Menard began playing poker following the Moneymaker boom. He jested that he’s now the Team PokerStars Pro’s competitor: “Little did I know that four years from then, I’d be playing the one and only Chris Moneymaker heads-up in a $100 rebuy on PokerStars.” Menard took third in the $55 rebuy on PokerStars in August for $15,500. He took fourth in an FTOPS event three days earlier for $16,500. In addition, he’s final tabled the Full Tilt $750K Guaranteed and $1K Monday tournaments for over $30,000 each. However, a massive six-figure score has eluded him. He told PocketFives.com, “I need to work on my deep-stack game, honestly. I can admit that I play pretty well with a stack from 10-40 big blinds, but when I'm deep, I start making mistakes and hero calls that end up costing me a lot of chips.”
He sends a shout out to PocketFivers sheets and TheRealPokerccini and tells Dipthrong to QTO. Congratulations to Jeremy Chipsteela Menard for his fifth Triple Crown title. Check out the full list of Triple Crown winners.
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