Canadian
Mike "goleafsgoeh" Leah is yet another testament to The Great White North's ability to produce top-notch poker players. 33-year-old Leah has had a competitive nature for most of his life; he played a lot of sports growing up and was even on the Canadian Olympic wrestling team while he finished his schooling.
Leah currently works very longs hours in a marketing job, but despite that, he has accumulated a very respectable set of online tournament results. He currently has close to $150,000 in
Online Player of the Year-
qualified cashes in 2007, including a third-place finish in the PokerStars
Sunday Warmup ($31,000) and a first-place finish in the PokerStars
Nightly Hundred Grand ($28,000). He has 15 other OPOY-qualified finishes in addition to those big scores.
"I haven't had the time to put into poker that most of the other big players have, but I'm proud of what I've accomplished, comparatively," Leah said. "Most of the guys who are ranked around me just do poker full time. I'm really looking forward to expanding my poker career above my work career and taking a run at
Player of the Year in live tournaments, next year."
Leah told
Card Player that he is currently recruiting some of the top online players from Canada and the United States to form an elite tournament poker team to make a run at live tournaments in 2008.
Card Player recently snagged Leah for an interview to talk about his consistently deep tournament finishes and about his best advice for tournament play:
Shawn Patrick Green: You were killing it in February of this year. What was going on that month?
Mike "goleafsgoeh" Leah: This year I have been trying a lot of different tournament strategies where I would purposefully either be much more patient or much more aggressive for a week or two, and I think back then I just found a style that was working well. For me, a lot of it is about confidence; when I'm running good, I'll run good for a while. This has really only been my first year of playing a lot of tournaments.
SPG: Your biggest online score so far was when you finished in third place in the
Sunday Warmup on PokerStars just last month. How hard was it to have outlasted 2,364 other players but come up just short of the top prize?
ML: I am probably one of the most competitive people you'll ever meet when it comes to poker or sports or anything. So, whether I cash in 2,000th or second, I'll be extremely upset for the next while. In that specific tournament, I was pretty furious not to get first place, because I wanted first place really badly. It was my biggest online cash, so I was happy with that, and I think I learned a lot from one of the guys that I was playing the final table with, because he had absolutely no fear and he was probably the most aggressive person I've ever played with. So, it took me a little while to adjust, but I think I learned a lot from playing at that final table and from playing in that tournament.
SPG: What exactly did you learn, then?
ML: How to adjust my game more quickly to a lot of people at the table. I gave away a lot of chips because I was stubborn and I didn't adjust my game as quickly as I should have to his style of play.
SPG: You did end up making the adjustments in the end, though?
ML: I did, and I'm happy with the adjustment that I made, I just ended up in one race with him and lost. If I had won the race, I would have had 90 percent of the chips in play. Actually, I would have knocked him out, because I had more chips at the time. What I was upset about was that I pretty much donated $15,000 to the short-stack at the table because I took a chance by getting into a race with the other big stack. But, other than that, I was happy with the adjustment I made, I just ended up getting in with a pair against his A-K and lost the race.
SPG: What exactly was the adjustment, though, against that aggressive player?
ML: The adjustment that I made was that I was not going to raise him, and if he raised me I was going to go all in. Looking back on that tournament, I made that adjustment pretty late. The adjustment that I would have liked to have made was to limp into a lot more pots and to try to see a lot more flops with him and catch him, because he was raising and shoving any bet, and I eventually would have caught him. But I was raising and folding to him a lot because he was pushing his stack around. It was a good experience to look back on and evaluate; I'm a very stubborn person and can really only learn from my own mistakes.
SPG: While you have a ton of OPOY-qualified scores, only one of those resulted in a win, so how well-versed are you in heads-up play?
ML: I'm way, way, way more confident now than I was before. I don't think you'll find too many seconds, lately, either [laughs]. If I get heads up with an opponent, I'm confident that I will beat that opponent, whereas a year ago it would have been the opposite.
SPG: How have you built that confidence?
ML: Just by playing heads up and beating people. I had a couple of good finishes in the weekly heads-up tournaments, and just in terms of closing tournaments, I closed a couple of $100 events and some other tournaments that I ended up getting first in.
SPG: It seemed like you kind of came out of nowhere in online poker. How did you get your start?
ML: My start was when I satellited into the [PokerStars]
Sunday Million from an $11 turbo rebuy and ended up making the final table. I think it was one of the first
Sunday Millions I had ever played, and I just had a really, really lucky tournament and ended up making the final table. That was back in March 2006. In the next two weeks, I made three more final tables, winning $2,000, $2,000, and then I finished second to
ActionJeff [Jeff Garza] in a $300 Saturday tournament on Stars for $14,800. That was a few weeks after my first cash of $21,000 in the
Sunday Million. Before that, my biggest cash was $75 in a $10 tournament. So, that helped the bankroll.
SPG: What was the hardest lesson that you've learned while climbing the ranks?
ML: To not play online cash games.
SPG: Why is that?
ML: Because I
don't win [laughs]. Even in live cash games; I win money in tournaments to donate to players on live cash-game tables. I love the sport of poker, and that's why I love tournament play. There's a winner and a loser, and once you lose your chips, you can't get them back. When I play cash, I usually end up getting bored or just making calls or plays that I wouldn't make if I were in a tournament because I can just rebuy. I have to play at such a high level to focus enough that I don't want to play there. I lost a lot of my bankroll, and I've gotten to the point now where I will absolutely never play a cash table again, be it online or live. It's not what I enjoy, and I don't do well at it. I've tried the odd foray in cash games, and it lasts a little while, but it always ends up the same [laughs]. No matter how much money I end up winning, I'll always end up losing it at some point in the session before I leave. So, yeah; no, I will never play a cash game again.
SPG: What does it take to finish consistently deep, as you do?
ML: Not making mistakes. In any tournament I've played, whether live or online, I can look back on one specific hand that eliminated me from the tournament or put me in peril. In a tournament with that many people, or even in a tournament with a small amount of people, it's just avoiding making that one big mistake. Sometimes you have enough chips to survive that mistake or bad beats, but it's that one time when you think someone has A-K and then have A-A, or making that one call instead of folding that makes the difference. And I think what's gotten better with me is being able to read players and to know when to call and when to fold. But I've also really improved my game in being able to accumulate chips so that I
can make a mistake or suffer a bad beat and not have it end my tournament. And that's the one adjustment that I've made to last longer, being good at accumulating chips early and building a chip stack so as not to blow up like I sometimes do late in a tournament. Like last night in the $100 rebuy, I was chip leader with 45 people left and I finished in 40th.
SPG: You seem to be a big fan of the PokerStars
Nightly Hundred Grand. Do you have any advice for that tournament, in particular?
ML: As with a lot of the satellited-into tournaments, there are usually a lot of bad players in there, and I usually catch them in mistakes early in the tournament and I build my chip stack early when a lot of the bad players are in there making bad plays. And I try to use the stack that I build early to sail through the rest of the field. Again, if you can avoid making mistakes while there are a lot of bad players making mistakes, you can accumulate chips. The best strategy that I know of that I've used in live or online tournaments is to just avoid making mistakes; raise when you should raise and fold when you should fold. And if you do that, you'll usually make it deep in more tournaments than you don't.
And that specific tournament is usually the tournament that I focus on at night, if I'm playing that; it's the biggest tournament most nights. So, I try my hardest in that, which is why I do the best in that.
SPG: Thanks a lot, Mike.
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