The poker resume of Mike ‘SirWatts’ Watson is overflowing with incredible achievements. From seven-figure scores to capturing major online titles, Canada’s current #1-ranked online crusher has added a new accolade by entering the elite air of the top five of the online poker rankings for the first time in his over 14 year career.

Thanks to a late-summer surge filled with a string of impressive scores, Watson jettisoned into his current spot at #4 in the world and, for the time being, has eclipsed some of online poker’s biggest names, including ‘Lena900’, Yuri ‘Yuri Martins’ Dzivielevski and Chris ‘Gettin Daize’ Oliver, to enjoy a career-high worldwide ranking.

One just needs to look at Watson’s dominance in the month of August to see how he leveraged an online heater to hit new heights. He found early month success playing in big buy-in events including the August 9 edition of the PokerStars $5,200 High Roller where he finished as the runner-up for a $92,337 score. Two days later, Watson found another second-place finish in the Natural8 $5K High Roller Blade Prime for $80,176.

Watson really hit a mid-month stride when he won back-to-back $10K Short Deck High Rollers on Natural8. On August 12, he topped the small-but-elite field of 20 entries and eventually defeated Mikita Badziakouski heads up to walk away with a $66,569 win. He took those winnings and played the same event the very next day. This time he bested Rozvadov’s King’s Casino owner Leon Tsoukernik to pick up another $110,400 victory.

While all of those big money scores were an important part of Watson’s month, none of them helped him when it came to his PLB point total. He was smashing huge scores but the field sizes hadn’t done anything for him in terms of rankings. But Watson isn’t just a small-field specialist and he showed that late in the month.

‘SirWatts’ was in the midst of grinding the World Series of Poker on GGPoker and at the same time playing large field events on PokerStars when he racked up an impressive string of results that sent his PLB score soaring.

It got started on August 25 when Watson picked up a cash in the High Roller Super MILLION$ on Natural8 for $21,665 and 190.63 PLB points. The next day he took 5th place in WSOP Event #72 ($1,500 Limit Hold’em Championship) on GGPoker for another $26,069 plus 260.52 PLB points.

On August 30, Watson was battling for titles during PokerStars 2020 World Championship of Online Poker finishing in second place in Event #2-H ($10,300 NLHE 8-Max, PKO) for a total of over $198,000 and 597.43 PLB points, the eighth-highest score of his career. He again nearly grabbed the title in Event #3-H ($5,200 PLO 6-Max High Roller) where he fell in third place for $20,184 and 205.44 PLB points. The very next day Watson switched his focus and ran deep in a pair of WSOP side events, earning a total of more than $12,000 and, more importantly for his ranking, another 271 PLB points.

And while, no longer technically August, he finished off his stretch of PLB pickups with a final table finish in the September 1 edition of the High Roller Super MILLION$ which earned him $45,324 and 420.83 PLB points. In total, over the course of three days and five events, Watson earned nearly 1,500 PLB points.

In the month of August alone, Watson earned roughly $677,000 (and 2,031 PLB points) which helped push past the $7 million mark in lifetime online earnings.

Of course even though August was over, the winnings didn’t stop there for Watson. Since then, he’s picked up 10 five-figure scores and a considerable amount of PLB points which has helped him hold on to his #4 ranking for the past three weeks.

However, in order to keep the momentum going, and take a shot at the #1 spot, Watson will need to get back to the online grind. After a summer of heavy grinding, he only racked up four total results in the entire month of October. That said, with over $20 million in total career earnings, when Watson decides to set his sights on climbing even higher than his current #4 spot, he’s a good bet to get there.