Mike "Timex" McDonald

Member of the young guard, Mike McDonald was born on September 11, 1989 in Canada. It did not take a long for his poker career to explode as he managed to win EPT German Open for $1,370,000 at the age of 18. Before taking up poker professionally he used to play chess on fairly competitive level, and had also enjoyed playing all sorts of cards and board games. According to his own words, these were not his first ventures in to the poker world. McDonald started playing online as early as 2005, mostly limit hold’em games. Couple of months into playing, he realized that tournaments were offering great value for money with very soft fields and usual overlays so he started playing those. It did not take long before he booked some of his serious scores on Paradise including a win in 100k guaranteed for 23k as well as 3 way chop in an invitational sit and go for top ten tournament players for 330k. At this time, Timex was still more than a year away from reaching his legal age to be able to gamble. He spent some time at the university and instead of playing himself; he invested a lot of money in other players. Eventually this turned out good for him and his bankroll continued to grow. Around this time he went to the PCA for a couple of days and caught a live tournaments bug, even though he was still not able to play them. During all this time, he was very active in the online poker community and his nickname Timex is actually his 2+2 forum alias. Some of the people who supported him and helped his game progress were aware that he was underage but mix of great talent and good run more than made up for the fact. When he finally reached the legal age for playing, he has quickly become known amongst the other regulars in the game for his “death stare”. It is one of his trademarks apart from his great poker skills and certainly makes for some good TV – not only because of the stare itself but also because of the sometimes hilarious reactions he gets from people who are not used to him. 24 years old at the time of writing this, Mike McDonald is sitting in the 23th place of the all time money list and the 3rd place for Canada. His overall winnings amount to nearly $10,000,000 and he is currently ranked number one on the Player of the Year list. Apart from his EPT score, some other cashes include 3rd place in the Aussie Millions 250k event for $1.7 million in 2014, 2nd in the 100k Aussie event for $1.3 million in the same event as well as 2nd in the 2013 PCA Main Event for over $1,000,000.