He has been a member of PocketFives since 2007, our second year in operation. He hails from Cardiff in the United Kingdom and recently took down a coveted online poker Triple Crown. A Triple what? The award requires a person to take down three $10,000 prize pool tournaments across three sites tracked for the PocketFives Poker Rankingsin the same seven-day period. His name: Paul Senter (pictured), but you can call him Senterpied.

“I feel pretty good about it,” Senter told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “I have been running pretty well so far this year.” The first leg of his Triple Crown was an impressive win in the PokerStars Big $162for $22,000, or 350 PLB Points. Next up was the 888 Poker Monsoonfor nearly $3,000 and another 120 PLB Points. The final leg was the $20,000 Guaranteed Rebuy on WPT Poker, which sits on the same network as PartyPoker, for $4,200 and 141 PLB Points.

He told us that he was playing relatively normally in the Big $162, trying to pick up chips where he could. “Then, a reg raised-called A-J against my A-Q on pretty much the exact bubble, which took me to about 35x,” Senter told us. “As it got deeper, I had a look at the field and didn’t really recognize anyone, so I was quite excited, but felt a bit of pressure because I’d be annoyed if I didn’t do well.”

He was far and away the highest ranked member of PocketFives to grace the final two tables and said, “It was a pretty weird final table with about five short stacks trying to climb the ladder and three or four of us trying to keep the pressure on.” Two days after his Big $162 win, he laid claim to a Triple Crown.

In January 2012, Senter turned in a rock solid month that included a chop of a PokerStars Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP) tournament and a second place finish in a tournament on Microgaming for $150,000 total. Senter rehashed, “That month was pretty nice. The TCOOP structure was pretty crazy. The hand before we dealt, I re-shoved with Q-Q and got a fold, which meant I got about $30,000 extra in the deal.”

After the solid month, Senter bought a house, but lost out on $30,000 from his Microgaming score after Purple Lounge suffered financial difficulties. He added, “I went traveling to Asia with my girlfriend, which luckily was timed perfectly, and then was ready to fight when I came back.”

We always like to hear about purchases of new houses, so we asked Senter about his digs. He reported, “It’s in Cardiff for students to rent, but yesterday I moved in with the girlfriend in Chester right by the racecourse.”

Senter got his start in poker while swimming during college. He explained that an aquatic career was not in the cards: “Soon, I realized that I’d gone as far as I could, so I found poker and my swimming career kind of faded away. I have been playing for a living ever since, which is about six years now. I started playing single-table tournaments for the first year and then in the second year, I gradually moved to just MTTs.”

The U.K. native added that he had to be cautious with his bankroll from the get-go: “I have never been backed and had to prove to my parents that it was a good idea, so I was pretty careful with my bankroll to start with.” The result: $1.9 million in tracked cashes in his PocketFives profile, about one-third of which has come on PokerStars. He is also #52 in the Rankings.

In case you wanted to know, Senter specialized in the 100- and 200-meter freestyle and front crawl and was so successful that he was once ranked first in his age group in Britain in the former. He won quite a few Welsh championships to boot. He joked that while that time in his life has passed, “I definitely don’t miss the 5:00am alarm.”

Learn more by visiting our Triple Crown Wall of Champions.

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