“The luxury of being your own boss and not having people telling you what to do and when to do it by was enough for me.” Those were the words of Greig Cushnie (pictured), known on PocketFives as Cush, when asked why he wanted to play poker for a living. He calls Dundee City, Scotland home and recently claimed his first PocketFives Triple Crown.

The Scottish player won the PokerStars $5.50 Rebuy, iPoker $30 Rebuy, and Microgaming Mosh Pit within a week for $11,000 total and told us, “It was more of a weight off my shoulders than anything. I had been close to a Triple Crown a few times in the last year and, on the night I won it, I also got third place in a $100 freezeout, so I started thinking I was never going to get there again.”

He said the $30 Rebuy on the iPoker Network was the most difficult of the three Triple Crown wins to close out. Why? “It was a smooth final table for me,” he narrated, “but three-handed, I was up against BillyChatand BowdonRanger, who made it tough on me. I ran pretty well heads-up and made it 2/3 for my Triple Crown.”

Cushnie admitted he had wanted a Triple Crown “for ages,” but “kept coming in third, fourth, or fifth in the final tournament in the past. For a while, I forgot about trying to reach it and didn’t put as much volume in as I should have. I always knew it would be hard and I’d need to run well to achieve it.”

November marked just his second month back from a half-year off from poker. “It felt really good that I was able to get back to my A-game as quickly as I did,” the Scotland pokercommunity member pointed out. Cushnie is nearing $800,000 in tracked online MTT cashes, about two-thirds of which has come on PokerStars, where he plays as 2fingerz 2u.

He explained how his friends and family reacted to his poker career initially: “I had mentioned playing poker from time to time when I was doing my apprenticeship, but my friends and family kept telling me to get my trade behind me and then maybe in the future give it a go. They didn’t think I would actually go ahead with it. Two weeks after I got my trade, I told them I was going to play poker full-time and they were pretty shocked, but they were really supportive and still are. If they hadn’t supported me, I probably wouldn’t have gone ahead with it.”

Cushnie plays socceron Saturday and Sunday, and apparently both teams he runs with are pretty good: “Both teams play in the top league and are league champions. I play midfield for both. A lot of players from my Saturday team also play for my Sunday team, so we are all really familiar with each other. We use the same home pitch facilities, which is a bonus. Both days feel exactly the same, just in different leagues versus different teams.”

Other top-tier scores for Cushnie include a final table one year ago in the PokerStars Sunday Million for $158,000 officially and a victory in the site’s Big $55 in March 2012 for $21,000. He is the top-ranked PocketFiver out of 21 with PLB scores in Dundee City and owns over 1,000 tracked in the money finishes. In the live world, the Global Poker Index has Cushnie at #17,493.

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