Brandon completedonkBarnes (pictured) has had a rock solid 2013. At the halfway point of the year, the Canadian has chopped the Full Tilt Poker $350,000 Guaranteed for $65,000, finished second in the PokerStars Sunday $100 Rebuy for $57,000, and claimed an FTOPS title for $85,000. Oh, and the first two scores were on the same day back in March. Not too shabby.

He told PocketFives that the month of March overall was pretty mind-blowing: “That was definitely one of the most interesting months of my life. The 24th of March was actually my birthday, so winning the FTOPS was a pretty great present. I’ve been deep in a ton of FTOPS events, but never managed to final table one before that win. I had a pretty rough SCOOP, but I’m excited to go back to playing mostly online cash games and just tournaments on the weekend.”

Was he just in the zone? Did his $200,000 “run good” come out of the blue? He assessed, “It was kind of unbelievable. I had been on a pretty huge downswing ever since I got ninth in the EPT High Roller in San Remo, which was pretty brutal considering I was the chip leader with about 15 left. Nothing was going right until those two or three weeks and thenall of a sudden I just started running insanely well, playing my A-game all day, and everything just turned out well. I actually had a couple of other shots at big scores, but I guess the run good had to end eventually.”

His FTOPS title came in a $129 No Limit Hold’em Knockout. We asked him for a quick recap of the event, which he described as a “blur.” He explained, “I had a huge stack throughout the tournament and ended up at a fairly soft final table with a very good seat. I was able to abuse the bubble and really never had a shot of losing the tournament. That’s not something I can say about pretty much any of my wins, but everything seemed to just click during that win. I really felt like I had no chance of losing from about 27 left.” He defeated Hungary’s Zsiffin heads-up.

His ability to close may be tied to his prowess in cash games, specifically heads-up and six-max: “I’ve always been more of a cash game player. I thrive at deep-stack play and have always been fascinated by heads-up and short-handed cash games.” He added that his blockbuster month “won’t change my career whatsoever. I had a bad SCOOP, but unless I won the Main Event or something, nothing will change too much. I plan to get back to grinding mid- and high-stakes cash games and playing Sunday majors.”

Barnes resides with his girlfriend in Vancouver and told us that he plays a very limited amount of live poker in the Canadian city and its surrounding area. He made an emergence onto the poker scene after his grandmother taught him how to play blackjack, rummy, euchre, and a few other card games when he was eight or nine. Then, he said, “After my mom passed away when I was 12, I started playing play chip games and freerolls online to take my mind off everything. Between that and playing sports, that’s pretty much all I did during my early teens.”

The Canuck joined PocketFives in the first quarter of 2007 and has nearly $1.7 million in tracked online MTT cashes in his profile. If you want to look him up on PokerStars, search out the screen name TheMatadorCC. He is originally from Michigan, but moved to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico to play poker before eventually migrating to Canada.

When we asked if he had anything he wanted to add, Barnes passed down the following words of advice: “Realize that everyone is capable of making mistakes, especially when you’re young and have money. I find a lot of people are ignorant of that fact, and I definitely was. The last couple of years have been a huge learning experience for me and I’m finally at the point where I’m happy with my life, healthy, and looking forward to the future and hopefully winning a couple of bracelets in the years to come.”

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