Twenty year old Canadian online and land poker pro Mike McDonald (known as “Timex” online) has announced that he will be retiring from the game of poker after earning over $2.6 million in live tournament earnings.   Mike feels that his involvement with poker is keeping him from living a balanced life and posted the news of his retirement on his CardRunner blog last week.

During an interview Mike said   “I think in all honesty I should be a fairly interesting person given the amount of time, resources, experience and opportunities I have but to someone outside of the poker world I appear quite one-dimensional and although I think I am definitely appreciated once I get to know people, getting to know people is often tough since my world is so different from their world. This leads to tons of people in the poker world having literally 0 non-poker friends, but I don’t aspire to one day be completely engrossed in the poker world and after watching the “busto to robusto” movies and looking at the lives of older players it got me thinking about my future. Zeebo and Good2cu are both very accomplished people who have achieved great success in the poker world and whose lives at this point (assuming the video is accurate) are almost completely related to the poker world. I’m sure both of them are very happy with their lives I just think that I am trending towards a combination of the 2 of them and I think the goals I wish to accomplish are very different from what most people wish to accomplish.“

Mike is currently making enquiries at the University of Waterloo where he previously spent three semesters in order to take a few classes this summer and possibly returning to Waterloo or some other university in the fall. He may be planning a semi-retirement and could possibly make a comeback to poker in the future.