The Blog Begins!

Well I have been thinking about starting a blog for a while now; the launch of my website: mikeleah.com seems like the right time. My 3rd year as a full-time poker professional is coming to an end and I think it’s amazing how much I continue to learn about the game. I think back to this time last year and I am looking at situations from a much different perspective. I think my foray into coaching has helped my own game a lot; explaining theory to others has made it much clearer to me as well.

This year has been much different than my 1st two as I really cut back on my travel to focus on online, life and WSOP. I decided to take 3 months off of travel before the World Series to rest, prepare, get in shape and focus on the big online series’ in the spring. Unfortunately “Black Friday” put a damper on the online series’; FTOPS and SCOOP still went off although with smaller prize pools of course and a lot of uncertainty. I final tabled both an ftops and scoop event and It was a still a great warm-up for WSOP playing all of the mixed game events and tuning up my game. I had 6 cashes at WSOP and although I failed in my goal of winning my 1st bracelet, I had my best WSOP so far and some great chances to final table, 2012 will be my year! I took another 3 months off after WSOP to recoup, enjoy the summer and focus on WCOOP. As you probably know....That worked out pretty good for me; winning my 1st WCOOP bracelet in Badugi and chopping the Main Event for the biggest win of my career (So far): $560,000. (You can watch a hand history review of my main event run on tournamentpokeredge.com)

I took off to France and Italy shortly after for WSOP Europe where I cashed in the main event and EPT Sam Remo where I final tabled the only 2 side events I played. Although I felt I was playing the best poker of my career I decided to shut things down for the rest of the year to enjoy some time off that the big win made it easy to justify. I have kept sharp playing on Sundays and have been doing a lot of private coaching to keep busy in-between “vacationing”. I definitely have the “itch” back and can’t wait to get back to the live felt in the new-year. I will be going to PCA from Jan 6-17 and then to Borgata from Jan 17-Feb 4 for every event of both series’, I anticipate great results and expect myself to final table at least 1 event in each place. I will then head home for a couple weeks to recoup, go on a ski trip with family and then off to LAPC for the last couple weeks of February.

I am very excited about my website and will be spending a lot of time working on some cool ideas I have through my site: Poker and fantasy sports will be the theme of most of the ideas and should be fun; my website is very interactive and I look forward to talking to many of you on mikeleah.com about poker strategy and sports. I will keep this 1st post short as it is more of a review/introduction for me and I expect my future blog posts to be more current or theme based.

Until the next time,

Mike

*My latest video series begins today on tournamentpokeredge.com; it was a WCOOP session I recorded before my main event run.