SirCrafty Wins First Online Poker Triple Crown
It took all of five days for PocketFives.com member Sean SirCraftyRipp (pictured) to come away with an online poker Triple Crownafter taking down three tournaments across three sites within the same seven-day period. For Ripp, his journey to the top started on PokerStars, where he won the $22 Cubed on Christmas Day for $8,900. It was one of three four-figure scores that earned him his very first Triple Crown profile badge.
The holidays didn’t slow Ripp down one bit. On December 29th, four days after his victory on PokerStars, he took down the Full Tilt Big Double Afor $3,100 and notched the second leg of his Triple Crown. For his closing act, Ripp won the UB.com $10,000 Guarantee, a $25 buy-in online poker tournament, for $2,900. The New Yorker now sits at #252 worldwide in the PocketFives.com Rankings, his highest mark ever.
Ripp told PocketFives.com that capturing a Triple Crown has been a longtime goal. He explained, “I’m naturally a competitive person and since I started playing, I noticed that Triple Crowns had a lot of prestige and some of the best players online had them, so I figured it would be a challenge to try to obtain one. I want to try to accomplish as much in poker as I possibly can and this is one more feather in my cap.”
Prior to pursuing the Triple Crown, Ripp didn’t play much on UB.com. Despite not being familiar with the CEREUS Network site, he admitted that the PokerStars $22 Cubed was the toughest event to tackle: “It had the biggest field by far. I thought winning a tournament on UB.com would have been the toughest since I had limited time to complete the Triple Crown and never won a tournament there previously, but I just grew a couple of stacks and was pretty confident as those tournaments progressed that I was going to do it.”
On January 4th, one week after Ripp’s Triple Crown quest was concluded, he final tabled the UB.com $7,500 Guarantee, $10,000 Guarantee, and $20,000 Guarantee for over $3,000 total. He described his run through 2010: “I’m happy I started it off on a good note and ended it on a good note. I feel like I could have performed a little better in the middle of the year. What I’m most happy with is I feel like I have improved as a player a huge amount over the course of the year and think I’ll only continue to improve going forward.” 2010 marked his first calendar year as a professional poker player.
Now, Ripp has his eyes set on the top 100 of the Online Poker Rankings. “If I can perform consistently and put in the necessary volume, it’s a very real possibility,” Ripp told us. “I talk to a lot of the brightest minds in the game on a regular basis and feel like I have all of the necessary resources and tools to achieve that goal.” Among those who have had a profound impact on his game are top-ranked Jordan Jymaster0011Young, The Lab Rat(pictured), Mike telksTelker, and Michael SJUHawks18 Lavin.
Young (pictured) turned in an impressive 2010 that saw him win the PocketFives.com Yearly PLBand take down the December Monthly PLBtitle, his second in five months. We asked Ripp to break down Young’s game: “He’s fearless and that’s a quality few poker players have, especially when they are playing the biggest stakes available. He always knows where he is at in a hand and picks his spots well. He jokingly calls himself a ‘controlled spewtard,’ but there is an art to the spots he picks his 3bets, 4bets, 5bets, etc. in. To people who are unfamiliar with him or unfamiliar to good poker play in general, they may think he’s awful, but that’s what makes him so good. Most people just can’t even begin to comprehend the level of thinking he is actually on.”
Ripp was one of only a handful of Triple Crown winners in December. Check out the Triple Crown Wall of Champions for more details.