Can You Trust a Poker Pro on April Fool’s Day?

Was Mike McDonald telling the truth on the cusp of April Fool’s Day?

At the top of the poker world, success in poker is all about figuring out what level you’re opponent is thinking on and adjusting your own play properly. Knowing this, you have to ask yourself if you can trust what a top poker pro tells you online on April Fool’s Day.

In a blog post titled “Where To Go From Here,” former EPT Dortmund cha

mpion Mike McDonald, who has won more than $4 million between tournaments and cash games, devotes more than 2,200 words to why he’s quitting poker. Perhaps “quitting” is a strong word – the 20-year-old known online as “Timex” just says he’s just going to find other things to take up the majority of his time.

Acknowledging just how much better the players have become than they used to be, McDonald noted that his ability to continue bringing in big money playing poker would probably diminish over the next few years. “I also find that poker is at the point where with my goals/skill set/mindset I won’t be earning a significant amount of money in the next few years and beyond that even if I were to say bink the WSOP main, the money itself would probably do almost nothing to change my future,” he writes. “I think I more or less managed to be in the right place at the right time and made about as much money as I reasonably could have without becoming really good.”

At the end he says “I’ll bet you thought it was gonna be an April Fools Joke!” He certainly sounds convincing, but then again, he is a successful poker player. So the question is, is Timex making an April Fool’s Day move by thinking a level higher than everyone else?

Meanwhile top poker pro Daniel Negreanu has been working on his game a lot lately, noting in his blog that he has to stay sharp because the players are so much better today than a few years ago. Apparently brimming with confidence after his training, he announced that he was going to challenge Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey to heads-up no-limit hold’em matches for $1,000,000 each. 

According to Negreanu, all of them had already agreed to play him for a million apiece, and he told readers that the Aria casino had set aside a private room for the matches, which would start in two weeks. “We’ve agreed to play an 8 hour session and then play it by ear from there, provided it’s not over by then,” he wrote. 

Like more than a few of the lines he’s taken this season on High Stakes Poker, this one seems questionable. But before he could let it hang in the air, Negreanu jumped in broke the joke: “Are you nuts??? I ain’t playing any of those three guys heads up at no limit hold’em!”