The last hand took one queen.
Jamie Gold held Q-9, Paul Wasicka held pocket tens, and the flop came Q-8-5 with two hearts. Gold had top pair. The ace on the turn and the four on the river changed nothing, and at the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event at the Rio in Las Vegas, a Hollywood talent agent beat the other 8,772 players for $12,000,000.
The field size was a record, and so was the prize. It stayed the largest Main Event first prize for 17 years. Gold had led the chip counts from Day 4 onward and eliminated seven of his eight opponents at the final table himself, a run of control over a final table that few champions have matched.
A teenage intern in the talent business
Gold was born Jamie Usher in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 25, 1969. After his mother remarried, to Dr. Robert Gold, the family moved to New Jersey, and he grew up in Paramus. He finished Paramus High School in 1987 and took a bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York at Albany in 1991, then studied entertainment law at UCLA.
His career in entertainment started long before the degree. At 16 he was an intern at J. Michael Bloom & Associates, a talent agency. He became an agent himself before he turned 21 and later moved into management and production. Among the clients he worked with was Jimmy Fallon.
That background explains a lot about the way he played the 2006 Main Event. Gold talked constantly at the table, about his hand, about his opponents’ hands, about what he might do next. Some of it was true and some of it was not, and his opponents had to decide which. The ESPN broadcasts showed hour after hour of it. For a man who had spent his career in rooms where persuasion was the job, the table talk was a familiar tool.
The Bodog patch and the lawsuit
Gold went into the 2006 Main Event with ties to Bodog, the online poker brand, through work bringing celebrities to play under its name. That connection became the center of the dispute that followed his win.
In August 2006 Crispin Leyser, a fellow television producer, filed suit against Gold. Leyser said the two had agreed to split any winnings in connection with their work recruiting celebrities to play under the Bodog name, and that Gold had backed out after the victory. A federal judge issued a restraining order freezing $6 million of the prize while the case moved forward.
The parties settled out of court on February 6, 2007. The amount was not disclosed. The case damaged Gold’s reputation in the poker community more than anything that happened at the table.
The poker boom that made the record possible
The size of Gold’s field was a product of its moment. Online poker had grown fast after Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 win, and in 2006 thousands of players qualified for the Main Event through online satellites. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, signed in October 2006, cut that pipeline sharply, and the Main Event did not reach 8,773 entrants again until 2023.
The online market Gold’s generation grew up with has since been rebuilt state by state. New Jersey, the state where he was raised, legalized regulated online poker in 2013, and it later joined Nevada and Delaware in sharing player pools. If you play online from New Jersey today, the legal option is a licensed, state-regulated site, a very different setup from the mostly offshore rooms that filled the 2006 field. For how earlier eras of the game led to that point, see the history of poker.
Poker scores after 2006
Gold’s results after the Main Event were thin. He returned to defend his title in 2007 and went out on Day 1. Later that year he finished 35th in the WSOP Europe Main Event in London. His best result in the years that followed came in 2016, when he finished second in a WSOP Circuit Main Event in Los Angeles for $139,820.
As of 2023 his career live tournament earnings stood a little above $12.6 million. Almost all of it comes from one week in July and August 2006. That pattern is common among Main Event champions from the boom years, who won one enormous tournament against a field dominated by recreational qualifiers and then found the professional circuit much harder.
It is also why a lifetime earnings figure tells you little about a player’s finances. The $12 million was gross, part of it was disputed in court, and the settlement terms were never made public. Anyone who prints a precise net worth for Jamie Gold is guessing. For context on how large poker fortunes are actually built, see the richest poker players and their net worth.
The record that still stands
Main Event fields have since grown past Gold’s. The 2023 Main Event drew 10,043 players, the first five-figure field in its history, and Daniel Weinman’s $12,100,000 for first place finally moved Gold’s prize to second on the all-time list. Later champions, with fields just as large, received $10 million, because the WSOP has spread more of the prize pool down the payout table.
That leaves Gold’s $12,000,000 as the second-largest first prize the Main Event has paid, won from a field more than a thousand players smaller than Weinman’s. It was also the last Main Event played before the UIGEA, the final summer in which online satellite winners from across the United States arrived at the Rio by the thousands.