One of last month’s PocketFives Triple Crownwinners was Latvia’s Kristaps Bertulis (pictured), who appropriately goes by bertulsonson our site. His run at his first Triple Crown included victories in the 888 Poker $20,000 Friday Challengefor $5,400, the PartyPoker $10,000 Guaranteed Speedfor $3,600, and the PokerStars.fr Storm for $2,900. He happily told PocketFives, “I have Triple Crown, baby, and I’m going for another one.” Thanks, Scotty Nguyen.

The 888 Poker tournament was the final victory Bertulis needed to score his first Triple Crown and get a brand new badge in his PocketFives profile. We asked him to describe the tournament’s structure: “The structure was slow. I was down to 10 big blinds and then won a flip. After an hour, I was first out of 200 players until the final table bubble. Then, I lost a huge pot and fell to last out of 11 people remaining. I went into the final table 6/9 and everyone was super tight. There were a lot of steals and 3bets.”

He ultimately nabbed the chip lead, which he retained all the way until heads-up play. The hand that put him over the hump was an all-in confrontation with A-2 against pocket jacks, which sealed a $5,400 payday and a Triple Crown.

PocketFives has a pretty boisterous Latvia pokercommunity, and we bet a few of them were cheering at his achievement. Bertulis is at the top of the Sortable Poker Rankings for the European country and began playing three years ago after school with friends. “Then, I was thinking what I would be doing after I finished school. During my last year of school, I was trying to play poker half professionally and decided to go for it full-time.” For the last two years, he has played professionally. Bertulis told us, “Nowadays, there are a lot of good players in Latvia.”

He elaborated on his back-story: “When I graduated school, I told my parents that I was going to play poker for a living and my dad said, ‘You can’t make money from poker. Just go find a real job or go study.’ After that, I worked really hard, started to study poker, and took coaching lessons. After my first $5,000 score, my dad was surprised and he didn’t believe it happened. Now, he is super interested in how I’m doing.”

The highlight of his poker career to date was a fourth place finish in a Supernova freeroll on PokerStars for $66,000 a few months ago. On how his career changed as a result of his landmark finish, Bertulis explained, “When I was playing it, I was backed. Now, I am still backed, so it didn’t really change my career, but I’m happy I did so well in it.”

Everyone plays poker for different reasons. For Bertulis, the feeling of beating his friends made the game quite alluring. He also said he enjoys making a big bluff or a big hero call.

It wouldn’t be a proper Triple Crown article if we didn’t actually talk about what a Triple Crown is and how you can score one of your own. Bertulis was one of a dozen Triple Crown winners in September. Getting one requires winning three $10,000 prize pool tournaments across three sites tracked for the PocketFives Rankings within one week. We’ve had 82 players accomplish the feat so far in 2012. In 2011, a year marred by Black Friday, 67 players still managed to score a Triple Crown award.

Bertulis is the very first Triple Crown winner from Latvia, which sits at #26 in our Country Poker Rankings, sandwiched in between Hungary and Greece. He is #321 worldwide in the PocketFives Rankings headed into Wednesday’s recalculation of the leaderboard.

Our interview subject’s largest tracked cash to date was worth $15,000 and came after a win in the PokerStars Big $55 in April. He has turned in 2,009 in the money finishes, averaging $269 apiece.

Visit our Triple Crown Wall of Champions to see who else has earned one.