Episode 56: One-on-One with Mike McDonald
Establish The Run Fantasy Football
Fantasy Football
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2020
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike McDonald is one of the most successful and well-known gamblers of the modern era. He sits down with Adam Levitan to discuss everything from poker to DFS to prop bets to running a sportsbook.
Editor's Note: NFL Draft Season is in full swing. Head to EstablishTheRun.com for full coverage. Everything on the site is currently free.
TIMESTAMPS: Mike’s background in Poker (1:17) | Bank of Timex (5:42) | PokerShares (10:45) | The Bales Push Up Bet (16:22) | The Day-to-Day Life of PokerShares (23:51) | The responsibility of Sportsbooks to keep rake low (36:06) | Sportbooks Limiting Sharps (42:01) | Mike’s DFS career (47:07) | The 2020 NFL Season (49:03) | The Free Throw bet (53:22) | Listener Questions (1:09:40) |
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And Oh, Hello and welcome to episode 56 of the official Establish the Run.com podcast. My name is Adam Levitan. I'm one of the |
| 0:36.3 | co-finders here at ETR. I hope you are all healthy and well in your respective |
| 0:41.4 | quarantine today. |
| 0:43.2 | We have a very special guest. |
| 0:44.3 | This is a young man who rose to power |
| 0:46.7 | with ridiculous success as a teenager in the poker streets. |
| 0:50.2 | He's well known in the crypto space. |
| 0:52.1 | He's on the other side of the counter taking action now. |
| 0:54.0 | He's our friend from north of the border. |
| 0:57.0 | It is Mike McDonald, aka TimeX. |
| 0:59.4 | Mike, how's it going? |
| 1:01.1 | That's going good. |
| 1:01.9 | Thanks for having me on the pod. And it's and thanks for calling me young. I turned 30 recently and you know any |
| 1:09.5 | I get ID or anything. It's always a nice compliment. Yeah good for you welcome to the 30s enjoy |
| 1:15.8 | yourself I think before we get to your 30s or your 20s there's a lot of people |
| 1:21.1 | listening a lot of DFS people because when we're going to get to this why you haven't been in the DFS streets. It's egregious but |
| 1:27.7 | We're going to get to that but a lot of DFS people may not even know the whole backstory here. What were you doing before poker and how did you find |
| 1:37.3 | poker because for those guys I don't know Mike I guess first came to popularity by winning an EPT. I think it was like 2008 for like 1.3 million I believe at the age of 18 if I'm not mistaken. |
| 1:50.3 | Yeah so I guess what I was doing before that, I guess would have been high school. |
| 1:55.0 | So, you know, for me, I used to play chess competitively when I was a kid. |
| 2:01.0 | I wasn't very good or anything. But you know always |
| 2:04.3 | liked playing games and at one point you know I think my my chess coach he had made something like |
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