Mike McDonald hits the $10million mark and he's only 24!

Mike McDonald was the third player in Canada to eclipse the $10-million mark, after Daniel Negreanu and Jonathan Duhamel preceded him. I just read the story over at 2+2 and his 2 interviews at http://igaming.org/poker/interview/the-mike-mcdonald-story-10-million-won-and-just-24-years-old/

Whats awesome is WoO might have helped put him on his road to success:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/61/mtt-community/lolol-stalkers-about-timex-1364/
In grade 10, our school had a casino night and it was possibly my favorite school event to date(I didn't win any prizes, but it was very fun). So for my 15th birthday my parents bought me a cheap set of poker chips for my birthday kind of as a joke (dollar store), and said they were looking at chips at "the game store"(then dufferin games), but they were sure they could find a better deal somewhere. So I went to the wizard of odds site to find out optimal strategy for blackjack, and my dad and I were going to play for fun, but on that site, there was a banner for pokersourceonline, which said they would offer me a free set of poker chips and $25 US if I played 250 raked hands. ........

(excerpts from the email):

after a few months, the $100 I put in was over $600 from .5/1......

and built my bankroll to about $5000 by about April.......

and that pushed my roll to over $10000.

He never looked back- all from that iniital $100!!!

He had at $300K score before he was even 18!

Wish we were all this good! :)

He's only 24? Jeez...looks a little rough! :-)

lol

This kid was born on born September 11, 1989.

http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=96339

Winning $10 million is only impressive if you haven't lost 10.5 million as well.

Unless I'm mistaken, which I may be, most 'winning lists' don't detail how many tournaments the player entered and failed to make the money.

deleted

It's also does not take out the cut he may have given to backers. Or how much cross-action he had with other players.

The poker databases should list net wins, otherwise its really impossible to know if someone is a winning player overall (not even including the staking arrangements). i guess the only true way is to see gamblers' tax returns, but then again some countries don't tax gambling winnings (like Canada?).

Therefore, I guess its true for any gambler, we all would never really know if they are a "true" winning player or not. The only thing we have is their word, or not. But If this player actually started with only $100 and has never held a job since, maybe he is a true overall winning player. But even that might be impossible to know, maybe he made money in investments elsewhere.

He never answered the question on how he was paid over $300k from a trny win when he was 16/17 yrs old. Pokerstars had refused to pay another player who won a major trny for over $500k when they found out he was under 18. Pokerstars gave the money to charity.

Quote: Buzzard

It's also does not take out the cut he may have given to backers. Or how much cross-action he had with other players.

With that being said. He may have a deal(s) where he never loses any of his own money. This is how so may poker players make their money. They get free rolls on winning. Some get book deals and paid for other things. They don't have to be winning players, just make good deals for themselves.

Backing poker players is a bad deal in most cases. I have seen deals where the player gets 50% of the win and none of the losses for the day. Backer will give up eventually. The player will find a new sucker. Even when they have make up deals, if the losses get to big, the player will just break the deal and start a new one with someone else.

Yeah tourney winnings lists are misleading. Jamie Gold is definitely broke for example. But I've always been under the impression "Timex" is pretty good.