Poker's Triple Crown King
It doesn’t matter what the game, the term “Triple Crown” is just magical. In baseball, it refers to leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in — and no one has done it since 1967; in horse racing, to win the Triple Crown, an animal must win all three of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. No horse has done that since 1978. I could go on, but you get the point: If it’s called the Triple Crown, it’s damn hard to do.
Until this past January, poker lacked a Triple Crown. Fact was, the chances of winning one of the world’s biggest tournaments were so remote — let alone three of them — that no one had bothered to coin the phrase in poker parlance or apply the terms of achieving such a goal. This past January, Gavin Griffi n changed all that.
Griffin first leapt onto poker’s televised stage when he came out of nowhere to win the $3,000 Pot Limit Hold’em event at the 2004 World Series of Poker. What made his victory there remarkable — aside from triumphing over a fi nal table that included heavyweights Phil Hellmuth, Ram Vaswani, and Gabe Thaler — was that he was just twenty-two years, two-hundred-sixty days old, at that point an all-time record for youngest bracelet winner ever.
Over the next two years, Griffi n appeared to be on the track to becoming just another youthful poker fl aming star, with one big minute followed by a seeming coming down to earth. He failed in those two years to score a cash in excess of $50,000, despite playing in biggest tournaments in the world. Gavin Griffi n was quickly becoming “Who?” That all changed in early 2007.
After taking a deep look at his game and realizing his unbridled, unthinking aggression wasn’t the right approach, Gavin made a transformation. He went from bully to theoretician, from uberaggression to controlled aggression. The results became apparent when his third-place fi nish at 2007 WSOP Circuit event at Harrah’s Rincon showed him his changes were for the better. The confi dence boost that success fostered would change everything.
Gavin made his way in February 2007 to Monte Carlo for the European Poker Tour’s season three Grand Finale, a €10,000 buy-in event which to this day is the largest poker tournament ever held off American soil. Facing 705 of the world’s best, he triumphed to the tune of a €1,825,010 score. Gavin Griffi n was back, and now had in his pocket two historic victories.
A strong showing at this year’s World Series of Poker showed that Gavin was on his game more than ever, but it wouldn’t be until 2008 that he’d inspire the creation of poker’s “Triple Crown” moniker. It was after traveling to the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure that he told his girlfriend, “I want to be the fi rst player to win a bracelet, an EPT, and a WPT.” With that goal in mind, he started making a concentrated effort to attend as many WPT events as possible. He didn’t have to attend many.
It was just the second WPT after Griffi n’s revelation that the Triple Crown would be born. Gavin made his way to the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City for the WPT’s 2008 Borgata Winter Open, an event he says now he likely wouldn’t have traveled to were the Triple Crown not on his mind. It’s a good thing he made the trip, since it resulted in what he calls “the biggest deposit I’ve ever made in my bank account.”
With the event inspiring 507 entries despite brutal weather serving as a deterrent to travel, Gavin entered the fi nal table as one of the event’s two big stacks along with David Tran, himself an experienced tournament pro with a 14th-place fi nish in the 2007 WSOP Main Event under his belt. Together, the two dominated the table, knocking out Ervin Prifti, Lee Watkinson, Noah Schwartz, and Thomas Hare in that order. Interestingly, it was precisely the order that their stacks stood at when the fi nal table began. If the pattern were to hold, it would have been start-of-day chip leader Tran who’d emerge victorious. Griffi n wasn’t having it.
Heads-up play began with Tran holding a T8,695,- 00-T6,520,000 lead, but Griffi n took the lead just three hands in. The two exchanged the lead several times, with Griffi n repeatedly getting Tran on the ropes only to have the Viet vet repeatedly double up to survive. Unfortunately for Tran though, nothing lasts forever.
The final hand saw all of the chips get in the middle before the fl op hit the table. Tran moved all in for T1,240,000 from the small blind on the strength of Ks 8s. After getting a count, Griffi n fi nally made the call with Qs Jc; Tran was ahead, but not by much.
The flop came Ac 9d 8d, giving David a small pair and Gavin additional outs to a gutshot. The turn Qd gave Gavin one of the cards he’d been looking for, suddenly putting him one card away from the win. The 10d on the river meant Griffi n’s better pair had held up. He’d won the hand. He’d won the tournament. He’d won over $1.4 million. Most importantly for our purposes here, he’d won the Triple Crown of poker by taking titles in the game’s three biggest circuits.
While others may eventually win poker’s Triple Crown, Gavin Griffi n has now permanently etched his name in poker’s annals by becoming the fi rst to do so. It’s been forty years since the last guy did it in baseball, thirty since anyone’s pulled it off in horse racing. In other words, we should enjoy it while it’s fresh in our minds; who knows when anyone will do it again.
