Making a BBCode Table

Okay, so here’s what I want my table to look like. The problem is that I can’t figure out why there’s such a huge gap at the beginning.
<table border="1">
<tr>
<tr><th>A</th><th>B</th><th>C</th>
</tr>
<td>a</td><td>b</td><td>v</td>
<tr>
<td>b</td><td>f</td><td>b</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>a</td><td>r</td><td>g</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>c</td><td>j</td><td>r</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>f</td><td>z</td><td>h</td>
</tr>
</table>

What am I doing wrong? Is there another way I can do it where there are lines separating the data instead of white space, that won’t have a mysterious gap?

The HTML table gets displayed with such a huge amount of empty space on this vBulletin board because of line breaks, remove them from the code (http://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php).

Well that was a simple solution. Thank you.