Player Focus: SirWatts

Michael Watson is perhaps best known, unfairly, for one tournament.

The man known as ‘SirWatts’ online won the WPT Bellagio Cup ($15,000 NLH) in July 2008 for a life-changing sum of $1,163,700 and with it caught the attention of the poker community – attention that he has been fully meriting for the last 2 years.

Watson, originally from St John’s in the eastern Canadian province of Newfoundland, saw off the likes of David ‘The Dragon’ Pham, Luke ‘IWEARGOGGLES’ Staudenmaier & David Benyamine in heads-up play to win his first ever major title. A quick glance at the collection of world-class online players who were railing him that day, including the likes of Jimmy ‘Gobboboy’ Fricke & Tony ‘Bond18’ Dunst shows how highly regarded ‘SirWatts’ is on the MTT scene. Dunst told us: “I am by no means exaggerating when I say that win could not have happened to a nicer or more deserving guy. Ive had a huge amount of respect for the game of Sirwatts for a long time despite his constant blanking out of live poker for such a considerable string before that win.” (It may have helped that he had a 5% share in Watson’s winnings, worth $83,000).

SirWatts has since followed this up with a 3rd in the £20,000 High Roller Event (held at the Vic in London) for a further $441,295 to take his live tournament winnings to over $2million at the tender age of 24. He is no one-hit wonder on the live scene, however, with a 10th in the LA Poker Classic for $61,610 (Feb ’08) & 7 WSOP cashes over 2 series demonstrates. But the Canadian got his foot in the door from being a prolific online MTTer and entered the Pocket Fives Top 100 as early as May 2007 (& re-entering in July 2008). His biggest score to date was victory in the PokerStars Super Tuesday for $75,250 in June ’07 but last year he seemingly took his game to another level. Undoubted highlights include 2 FTOPS final tables, in the $300 Re-Buys (6th, $42,481) & $200 NLH (3rd, $50,110), the latter of which being won by ‘imabigkidnow’, aka the legendary Daniel ‘djk123’ Kelly. Watson also final tabled WCOOP Event #24 on Stars, which incredibly was the No Limit Single Draw 2-7 Low Ball (2nd for $30,000) – perhaps we should watch out for SirWatts in some of the more obscure WSOP Events in 2009 with this sort of result.

He has also had runner-up finishes in the $200 Re-Buys ($31,168) & $100 Re-Buys ($21,250) & seems to have a real knack of second place finishes on Absolute Poker – 4 in the last year, with 3 in the $150k Weekly & one in the $100k Pro Bounty for a combined score of over $95,000. In fact, his prizes on Stars & FT alone total over $1million but given this isn’t even half of his total live winnings to date, maybe we should be considering Watson a live player first & online player second. Either way, he looks set to become another on the production line of Canadian tournament stars making an ultra-successful transition to offline poker.