The hand that made Gaelle Baumann’s name was a loss. In mid-July 2012, with ten players left in the World Series of Poker Main Event at the Rio in Las Vegas, she moved her short stack in with ace-nine. Hungarian pro Andras Koroknai called with ace-jack. The board ran out queen-queen-three, then an eight and a king, and nothing paired her nine. She finished 10th of 6,598 entrants and collected $590,442.
Shortly before, Koroknai had also eliminated Norway’s Elisabeth Hille in 11th, so both women left on the final-table bubble with the same payout. No woman had reached the Main Event final table since Barbara Enright finished fifth in 1995, and the 2012 final table, played in October that year and billed as the October Nine, stayed all male. Baumann had started that day as the short stack and doubled early through Greg Merson, the player who went on to win the title in October. His first prize of $8,531,853 was more than 14 times her payout, which shows how steep the Main Event ladder gets in its last ten places.
Early life: Strasbourg, languages and a home game in Perth
Baumann was born in Strasbourg, in eastern France. Before poker she went through university, and she holds master’s degrees in English linguistics and literature and in translation. Nothing in that path pointed to cards.
The turn came in 2007 in Perth, Australia, where she was invited into a home game. She deposited €100 online, played under the screen name “O RLY,” and worked up from single-table sit-and-gos to multi-table tournaments. After losing her tournament winnings she switched to live cash games, which became her main form for several years.
She returned to France in 2010. There she received coaching from the “Limpers,” a group of strong European cash-game regulars, and spent the following months building a bankroll as one of the few women grinding French online games at the time. She did not play major live tournaments until 2011. By early 2012 she had been playing full-time for roughly a year and a half.
If you started poker the way most people do, at a kitchen table with friends, her route will look familiar. The difference is how quickly she treated it as work.
The Winamax years
Winamax signed Baumann in February 2012, five months before her Main Event run. She was close to unknown outside French poker circles when she joined. She stayed for almost 13 years, through several generations of the team, alongside players such as Davidi Kitai and Pierre Calamusa.
The deep runs kept coming, if never on the 2012 scale. A selection of her bigger results:
Swipe the table
| Year | Event | Finish | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | WSOP Main Event, Las Vegas | 10th | $590,442 |
| 2015 | WPT Vienna Main Event | 5th | €35,500 |
| 2016 | WSOP Main Event, Las Vegas | 102nd | just under $50,000 |
| 2019 | EPT Barcelona Main Event | 20th | €61,710 |
| 2022 | EPT Barcelona Main Event | 26th | €41,290 |
The 2016 result had its own story. For the second time she was the last woman standing in the Main Event, four years after the first, in a field again numbering in the thousands. She also finished second at the Winamax Poker Tour Grand Final in 2014, and in 2024 she won the Kill Tilt Series in Mandelieu on the Côte d’Azur.
The pattern across those years is consistent. Large fields, long days, a habit of getting deep without converting into a title. That profile is common among tournament pros and it is one reason tournament earnings alone say little about what a player keeps. The site’s piece on why live poker rarely pays a living looks at the arithmetic.
Gaelle Baumann’s net worth and the 2012 Main Event cash
No verified net worth exists for Baumann, and none should be printed as fact. What is public is her live tournament record. As of 2026, The Hendon Mob lists just under $1.5 million in career live earnings, and the 2012 Main Event cash accounts for around 40 percent of it.
Those are gross figures. They do not subtract buy-ins, travel or any share sold to backers, and they say nothing about cash-game results, online winnings or sponsorship pay. The Hendon Mob records cashes only, never the events a player paid into and left with nothing. A single Main Event trip to Las Vegas starts with a $10,000 buy-in before flights and weeks of accommodation, and a European pro on the EPT and WPT circuits pays similar costs several times a year. A 13-year deal with one of Europe’s largest online rooms was clearly a real income source, but its terms were never published.
A long sponsored career with one big score at its center would put her wealth somewhere in the low millions of dollars. That is an estimate, and published estimates vary widely by source because none of them can see her expenses, her staking deals or her investments. For comparison with players whose fortunes rest on much larger and better-documented sums, see the site’s list of the richest poker players.
Leaving the team in 2025
In January 2025 Baumann and Winamax ended their partnership. She called the separation amicable and said she felt relief, because full-time poker was “no longer something I enjoyed.” Winamax’s team manager Stéphane Matheu called 2012 a year that had been “unforgettable for everyone.”
She did not announce a retirement. Her stated plan was to play for fun again, picking events close to her home in the south of France such as the Winamax Poker Tour final and the SISMIX festival, while spending more time with her family. She also named real estate and financial trading as new interests, and said the bankroll discipline from poker carried over to both.
Looking back on 2012, she said she “couldn’t quite grasp what was happening” at the time, and that being the last woman standing could encourage more women to sit down. More than a decade later, the all-male final table she missed by one spot is still the reference point every deep women’s run in the Main Event is measured against.