The month of April was mighty kind to Luke bananazooChiciak (pictured). Not only did the 30-day stanza mark his first Triple Crown, but it also featured his first Monthly PLB title. He now boasts five badges in his PocketFives.com profile and has a total of $692,000 in tracked online poker earnings. PocketFives.com caught up with its newest Monthly PLB winner to get the inside scoop on his recent tear.

Between April 5th and 8th, Chiciak brought home the win in five separate MTTs for $67,000 total. He triumphed in the UB.com $15,000 Guarantee for $4,300, the PokerStars $100 Cubed for $14,000, the Full Tilt Poker $100 Cubedfor $23,000, the PokerStars $15,000 Guarantee Turbo for $6,200, and the Full Tilt $75,000 Guarantee for $18,000. I’m tired just typing that. The victory spree was good for his first Triple Crown.

On his memorable three-day run, Chiciak told PocketFives.com, “I had been working really hard on my tournament game lately and it was awesome to get a nice score. That gave me the momentum to keep putting in volume with my A-game and the results came by themselves.” To close out March, he won the Full Tilt $100 Rebuy for $41,000. Several days later, he won the $60,000 Guarantee Super Turbo on Full Tilt for $18,000.

We’re always curious as to how players’ screen names are born, and with a screen name like bananazoo, we were especially interested this time. Chiciak gave the background to his PocketFives.com pen name: “Back in 2008 when I started grinding, I was just trying to think of the most random screen name possible. Somehow, I came up with watermelontown, which was too long, and so bananazoowas randomly born.”

His largest online poker score to date also came in April in the $1K Monday Million on Full Tilt, a Multi-Entry tournament. He busted out of the tournament in fourth place with a set against a flush draw and pocketed $82,000.

On the $82,000 haul, he admitted, “It really sucks not to have shipped it, but playing a field this tough and coming in the top four is a pretty big confidence-booster. I’ve been a cash game player for most of my career and have only started to focus more on MTTs in the last few months, so to have this much success in the last few weeks has been great.”

Why move from cash games to MTTs, you ask? “I started playing MTTs casually and realized how much dead money there is in comparison to these mid-stakes cash games,” Chiciak relayed. “I have a ton of experience playing heads-up as well as playing against very tough opponents and am very confident in my hand reading abilities. I found that a lot of the regulars in MTTs are much weaker than cash game regulars and can be exploited more easily.”

Chiciak’s cutback in cash games was quite stark, as he went from 100,000 ring game hands per month to 30,000. He’s come a long way since being introduced to poker through friends in high school and began taking the game seriously in 2008. His journey took him from small-stakes, $3 and $6 sit and gos to a run at 700,000 VPP on PokerStars last year.

In addition to stiff competition on the felts, Chiciak has to contend with school. He explained, “I finished off my exams at the end of April and basically have just been relaxing while trying to put in lots of tournament volume to hold onto the PLB. It’s tough to balance the two, so school often ends up getting a little neglected.” He’s wrapping up a Computer Science and Cognitive Science double major.

After he receives his degree, however, he noted that poker would still be his calling: “I’m committed to the game. I find poker to be such an amazing opportunity for motivated people who enjoy the game and are able to put in the hours right now. While I plan to play poker for the next few years, though, I’m still not sure what I’d like to do after that. I’m hoping I’ll figure it out by the time I’m bored of poker.”

Chiciak sits at #74 worldwide in the PocketFives.com Rankings and is also a UB.com Online Championship event winner. Needless to say, his profile badge lineup is starting to resemble the uniform of a decorated combat veteran.

On his accolades, the April MPLB champ seemed to amaze himself: “There are definitely moments when it all seems kind of surreal. My success in cash games was definitely more linear in the sense that it came more gradually, and it’s like all of a sudden I switched over to MTTs and I’m in the top 100. I remember back when I was playing $0.10/$0.25 cash games online how unreal all of the high-stakes games seemed, so it’s definitely cool to see how far I’ve progressed.”

He accrued a total of 3,300 PLB Points during April to claim the Monthly PLB title and boosted his bankroll by $257,000 in the process. He wanted to send shout outs to his roommate, Tamer melontownAlkamli, along with fellow grinders Shyam s_dot111Srinivasan and Griffin Flush_Entity Benger (pictured).

Congratulations from all of us at PocketFives.com to Chiciak for his April success. Check out the Triple Crown Wall of Championsand Monthly PLB winners page for more details.