Last month, Sweden pokercommunity member Oscar KungKroonKroon (pictured) claimed his very first online poker Triple Crown. The result: a new badge in his PocketFives profile. It wasn’t a small task either, as booking a Triple Crown meant three wins in $10,000 prize pool tournaments across three sites tracked for the PocketFives Online Poker Rankings in a seven-day period. Kroon needed all of five days to complete the feat.

“It means a lot more than it probably should,” the Swede told PocketFives in an exclusive interview. “I’ve been grinding for years now and gotten really close a bunch of times, so it feels great to finally ship it.”

Kroon’s journey included wins in the PokerStars Hotter $75for $25,000, the PokerStars.fr Night on Stars for $9,300, and the 888 Poker Tuesday High Rollers’ Challenge for $9,600. As you can see, the Hotter $75 was the feather in his cap and worth more money than the other two tournaments combined. He said about it, “The Hotter $75 is just another Turbo, but it does fit perfectly into my schedule.” The tournament boasts a $60,000 guaranteed prize pool. That’s hot.

We’re now just a few weeks away from the end of 2012. Poker players including Kroon have had a chance to evaluate their performance during the year and make changes headed into 2013. He told us, “2012 has been a really tough year poker-wise. I’ve only played on Sundays and one or two other days a week. As a result, it hasn’t been going too well. The added variance of almost only playing on Sundays has put me at breakeven or slightly down for the year. The future is a bit uncertain. I might start playing lower stakes, but whatever happens, I’m going to make sure I put in the hours from now on.”

Kroon got his start in poker after catching the World Poker Tour on television. He thought the roving tournament series looked “cool” and explained that his circle of friends began spreading $5 home games. “At one point, we even had a leaderboard,” Kroon said about the low-stakes competitions. “That was probably when poker was the most fun for me. Nowadays, it feels more like a job, although I’ve been really successful.”

As the home games continued, Kroon’s poker career expanded. He started playing online and, for a while, grinded $10 sit and gos. He continued, “Then, a friend from my home game who had already had some major tournament success offered to stake me in MTTs. I’ve never looked back.”

He is approaching $1.7 million in tracked cashes in his PocketFives profile, which he filled out in 2009 when he joined our community. Most of his war chest has come from tournaments on PokerStars and Full Tilt and you won’t see him branching out into non-Hold’em games any time soon: “I don’t play any other games at a serious level. I thought about learning Omaha properly and then realized there were too many cards and it would take too much work.”

He’s engaged in a few “musical projects” at the moment that occupy a chunk of his non-poker time and probably lessen his motivation to learn games like Omaha. Plus, he needs to focus on defending his perch of #127 in the PocketFives Rankings. He had climbed as high as #73 in July.

In case you’re wondering, the man they call KungKroon got his nine-letter moniker from a seventh grade teacher. He recapped, “I was horsing around in the back of the school bus and, over the microphone, she screamed something like, ‘Hey Kung Kroon, STFU!‘ And so a nickname was born.” By the way, “Kung” means “King” and “Kroon” is, of course, his surname. He plays as KungKroon on PokerStars and PartyPokerand as lpoo1on 888.

He wanted to send a shout out to his teammates in the recently completed WCOOP competition. We’re still looking for our first online poker Triple Crown winner of October. Learn how to score your own by visiting the Triple Crown Wall of Champions.