There were a little over two-dozen PocketFives Triple Crownsawarded last month. The accolade requires a player to win three $10,000 prize pool tournaments across three sites tracked for the PocketFives Online Poker Rankings within a seven-day window.

For Latvia’s Arturs Balodis (pictured), known on PocketFives as paybackLV, a Triple Crown came after victories in the PokerStars.fr Night on Stars for $10,000, an $11 No Limit Hold’em tournament on PokerStarsfor $2,100, and the Full Tilt Poker Triceratops for $4,000. Balodis told PocketFives in an exclusive interview, “I feel really great about it, as I’ve been putting a lot of volume in over eight sites. I was hoping to get one for a long time.”

On why a PocketFives Triple Crown was important, Balodis explained, “This was the first time when it actually was a goal because I won the first two tournaments in the first two days of the week, so I had a lot of time to score the third win. The other times, I was not so close to it, so it was a lesser goal, but it was still in the back of my mind.”

He is up to $868,000 in tracked online MTT cashes in his profile and said he has put in “massive volume” this year: “2013 has been a hard grind, as I’ve put in massive volume, about 15,000 MTTs so far. I’m happy with my results so far and I’m going to try to improve further. The goals for the next year are playing less, playing my A-game instead of my B-game or C-game, and taking a nice vacation.”

You’ll love the locations that the Latvian is eyeing for a vacation: “I definitely want to visit Bali, but that probably won’t happen this year. I would like to go to some music festivals all around Europe. For Latvians, all of Europe is only two to four hours away by plane, so going to countries where the climate is hotter during the winter is definitely a trend.”

In April, Balodis took down the PokerStars Hotter $55 for $23,000. His Night on Stars victory, which as we said was one-third of his Triple Crown, was the fourth largest we have tracked for him. He used to be a semi-professional Counter-Strike player in Latvia and many of his former teammates migrated to poker. Therefore, in order to keep with the times, Balodis followed suit. He has been playing full-time for a couple of years after starting out at $0.10 buy-in 360-man sit and gos.

It’s probably worthwhile to talk briefly about our Latvia poker community, which consists of 463 registered PocketFivers. The group from Latvia (pictured) has together tallied $16 million in tracked winnings on PocketFives across nearly 60,000 cashes.

He wanted to send shout outs to escalate and SIA nauda for their support over the years. Learn how to get your own Triple Crown by visiting our Triple Crown Wall of Champions.

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