It must be nice to be able to retire at the ripe old age of 20, with $2.6 million in your back pocket. The Canadian poker pro, Mike McDonald, known better by his online poker handle, Timex, has announced that he wants to retire from poker as he feels “no ambition towards poker.”

Timex wrote on his blog that while he still loved poker and that he will never quit playing the game, he feels that at this point he is ready to retire from his hugely successful albeit very brief poker career.

“In poker, although I’ve met tons of people I really like and had tons of cool experiences, I just kind of feel like there is nowhere to go from here,” said McDonald on his blog. “I can’t really think of anyone who is more engrossed in the poker world than me who I aspire to be like and poker seems to be a lot more isolating than I initially realized.”

McDonald has some major plans that he is excited to begin already, and having so many millions in live tournament winnings in his bank account will certainly help him. Education is certainly top of his list of priorities and he noted that on his blog as well. “I think returning to school and trying out a wide variety of courses, learning new things, meeting new people, and just beginning to live a life that is more in touch with everyone else seems aligned with my interests,” he wrote. “I currently am trying to get in touch with the University of Waterloo about possibly taking some classes this summer and depending on how that goes, may return to Waterloo or another university in the fall.”

Timex was the youngest person to ever win a live European Poker Tour event in 2008, by winning the German Open prize of €933,000. His latest win has been the $1,500 No Limit Hold ‘em event at the 2010 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tournament, where he bagged nearly $150,000.

What is pushing poker sites such as Sportsbook Poker and PlayersOnly to move from the Cake Poker Network to the fledgling Merge Gaming Poker Network?

While these two sites are scheduled to join the Merge network next month, the latest news to come out of the industry is that the two year old Lock Poker site has also announced its intentions to migrate.

It goes without saying that the addition of three poker rooms will do much to bolster the traffic at Merge, which has been suffering a decline in players in the past half a year or so.

Cake Poker, however, has actually seen an increase in traffic, so it is interesting to see whether the departure of three poker rooms will directly impact the traffic on both platforms.

By moving to the Merge network, Lock Poker will continue to offer its games and services to US poker players. The founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lock, Jennifer Larson explained why she had chosen Merge as the optimal platform to migrate to.

“They are aggressive, innovative and very progressive in design and development,” she said. “They are also dedicated to allowing their partners to be authentic which is integral to the success of a network in the long-term.”

The Merge network will certainly benefit from the addition of such as a high profile site such as Lock Poker, which hosted the Bluff Online Poker Challenge.

The site carries a contingency of Lock Pros such as Eric “Rizen” Lynch who contributes to Bluff and is also the VP of Product Development at Lock Poker. “I am very excited about the move to the Merge network and I will be working closely with them to further innovate Lock’s product,” he said.

“We are thrilled to be working with such an innovative and experienced marketing group,” said the Chief Executive Officer of the network, Anthony Taylor. “This deal will bring even more liquidity to the network and aid our continued growth.”

It has taken the guys in the white lab coats to tell us what we’ve since known since online poker burst onto the scene in the mid 90’s – poker played on the internet is good for our mental wellbeing. (Well for some at least)

A research team at the prominent McGill University in Canada have studied the blood pressure and blood sugar levels of players and found that online poker actually de-stresses us.

It works likes this: Our bodies’ adrenal gland secretes a stress hormone called cortisol in certain situations. The academic team found that when we play online poker, the level of cortisol in our bodies actually decreases.

The researchers monitored cortisol levels of players over a prolonged gaming session and watched in amazement as the stress hormone dipped as much as 17% in the average player.

While any novice online poker player could have told these boffs that this form of entertainment naturally causes them to feel better overall, it is still good to know that online poker gets endorsement from the scientific camp for a change.

The McGill guys stressed that it wasn’t only online poker that would make players’ cortisol levels drop. They noted that in fact any form of online gambling would produce the same results. (We think that the results of this study should definitely be appendixed to Rep. Barney Frank’s proposal to overturn the UIGEA).

So how do the scientists explain the decrease in the stress hormone in their own language? Apparently, when we focus on our games, after a while we become so immersed in them that our brains manage to block out everyday thoughts and happenings. When this happens, we start to feel more tranquil and thus our stress hormones drop.

This isn’t the first scientific study done on internet poker and gambling and others have also outlined the benefits of this form of entertainment. The long term benefits of poker are also well documented, including the improvement of cognitive functions and sharper brain activity as we age.