When the most recent update of the PocketFives Online Poker Rankingswas released on Wednesday, Romania’s 1banditpandastood pat at #5 worldwide. He’s been on a tear as of late and, accordingly, has the fourth best PLB tally worldwide to go along with the 11th best Pro Pollscore. 1banditpanda has not one, not two, but three Triple Crowns to boot, an award that requires a player to emerge victorious in three $10,000 prize pool tournaments across three sites tracked for the Rankings within a week.

“I’ve been grinding hard for a while and really wanted to go up in the Rankings,” the European poker star told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “It was just a matter of time until I cracked the top 10, and now the top five.” In mid-January, 1banditpanda took third in a PokerStarsTurbo Championship of Online Poker$215 No Limit Hold’em Hyper-Turbo tournament for nearly $50,000. He also binked his third Triple Crown in early February by winning tournaments on PartyPoker, PokerStars, and William Hill.

The closure of Full Tilt last year had a profound impact on his game. He told us, “I was mostly winning on Full Tilt and Euro sites. When Full Tilt was closed, I was at about $60,000 in tracked cashes on PokerStars and was occasionally playing the bigger stuff. After Full Tilt was closed, I decided to prove to myself that I could beat PokerStars too and compete against better players.”

A few months later, he’s now up to almost $600,000 in winnings on PokerStars and has over $1.4 million across all of the sites that PocketFives tracks. He explained the keys to success: “I started to put in some serious hours on PokerStars and tried not to auto-pilot while playing. I thought the key was adjusting from site to site and paying more attention to what was going on at the tables.”

Late last year, 1banditpanda turned in two impressive online poker cashes. In October, he final tabled the PokerStars Sunday Second Chance for $21,000. To kick off the month of December, he won the site’s Big $55 for nearly the same amount. He’s managed to find success off the felts of PokerStars as well, and remarked that other rooms have distinct advantages that include weaker players, smaller fields, and better structures.

However, 1banditpanda singled out no synchronized breaks and no late registration as major drawbacks of firing up sites not named PokerStars. For example, 1banditpanda broke down the pros of 888 for us: “I like playing on 888 because of the super soft fields in tournaments. They have small fields, which helps reduce the variance, and they have a time bank, synchronized breaks, and good tournament structures.”

By the way, if you sign up for 888 Poker through PocketFivesand make a deposit, you’ll get a 100% up to $600 bonus, $8 free, and one free month of PocketFives Training with the sign-up fee waived. The latter is worth $65 by itself.

Another network that 1banditpanda frequents is Ongame, which includes rooms like bwin. The Romanian previewed, “Ongame also has good guaranteed tournaments and has a time bank. They definitely would be better served by adding late registration and synchronized breaks, though.” You can sign up for bwin through PocketFives and get a free $5.50 tournament ticket along with one free month of PocketFives Training with the sign-up fee waived. Last week, bwin hosted the latest PocketFives Open.

Romaniais 12th in the PocketFives Country Rankings and its top 20 PLB scorers have a combined tally of 63,252 points. 1banditpanda has 60% of the country’s five Triple Crowns and his home nation sits sandwiched in between Denmark and Hungary on the leaderboard.

See where your country stands by viewing our Country Poker Rankings.

Look for the next Rankings update this Wednesday to see how 1banditpanda fares.