The final table of Celebrity Poker Showdown’s eighth season ended with Jason Alexander holding all the chips. Nobody at the table had played for their own money. The prize, $500,000, went to the charity Alexander had chosen, the United Way of America, to support the New Orleans area.
It was a television win, in a celebrity format, against other actors and entertainers. It was also a sign of something real. Alexander, best known for nine seasons as George Costanza on Seinfeld, was one of the celebrities who did not treat the poker boom as a publicity stunt. He kept playing after the cameras left.
From Broadway to Costanza
Alexander was born on September 23, 1959, and grew up in New Jersey. Before television made him famous, he built a stage career, and in 1989 he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. The same year, Seinfeld began its run on NBC. George Costanza, the insecure, scheming best friend, became one of the most recognized characters in American comedy, and the show ran until 1998. The character was based in large part on Larry David, who created the series with Jerry Seinfeld, and Alexander has said in interviews over the years that he only understood the role once he realized who George was modeled on. Few sitcom characters have been quoted more.
The role gave Alexander a level of fame that followed him into every card room he entered. It also gave poker audiences an obvious hook: a man who played a famously bad liar on television, trying to bluff for real.
Celebrity poker in the boom years
Poker on American television exploded after 2003. The World Poker Tour and ESPN’s WSOP coverage showed hole cards, and a wave of shows followed. Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown, hosted by Dave Foley with professional Phil Gordon as the expert voice, put actors and comedians at a table for their charities. Alexander appeared on the show twice, and his eighth-season win was the biggest result of the series for him.
He was in good company. The same years produced a run of actors who could actually play. Ben Affleck won the California State Poker Championship in 2004, and Jennifer Tilly won the WSOP Ladies event in 2005, a real bracelet in an open-entry women’s field. Tobey Maguire became known as a regular in private high-stakes games in Los Angeles. Next to those names, Alexander’s record is lighter, but it sits in the same group of celebrities whose interest outlasted the cameras.
He also played NBC’s Poker After Dark, the late-night show that sat six players at one table and let the hands run long. Alexander was part of the “Celebrities and Mentors” episode, in which famous amateurs played alongside professionals, and he finished sixth.
He signed up with PokerStars under the screen name J. Alexander, one of several Hollywood names associated with the site in that period.
The WSOP Main Event
The real test of a celebrity player is the Main Event, where nobody is playing for charity and the field is mostly people who have played thousands of hours. Alexander entered in 2007 and went out on Day 2. That is a respectable showing for an amateur, but not a deep run.
He came back in 2009. That year’s Main Event drew 6,494 players and was won in November by Joe Cada, then the youngest champion in the event’s history. Alexander reached Day 3, outlasting the majority of the starting field. For a recreational player with an acting schedule, getting through the first two days of a $10,000 event is a solid result. The early levels of the Main Event are slow, with deep stacks, and they punish the impatience that many amateurs bring; more on how stack depth shapes those levels in this guide to big-stack and short-stack strategy.
Magic, mentalism and reading people
Poker is not Alexander’s only serious hobby. He is an accomplished amateur magician, and in April 2006 he performed a run of mentalism and magic shows at The Magic Castle in Hollywood, the private clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts. The Academy named him its Parlor Magician of the Year.
The overlap is easy to see. Mentalism is the art of appearing to read minds, built on misdirection and on noticing what people give away. Poker rewards the same attention. If you have ever watched a mentalist work a room, you have seen the same skill a live poker player uses on a quiet opponent: watching for the small reaction that the person does not know they are giving.
Poker for causes
Alexander’s poker has often been tied to fundraising. His Celebrity Poker Showdown prize went to the United Way for the New Orleans area. In 2021, during the pandemic, he played in a virtual National Poker Tournament organized by the Children’s Tumor Foundation to raise money for research into neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes tumors to grow on nerves.
Charity tournaments are one of the main places where celebrities and recreational players meet the game, and they show the social side of poker at its clearest: the money goes elsewhere, and what remains is the table, the conversation and the chance to bluff an actor you grew up watching.
Alexander has never been a professional. He has no WSOP bracelet and has not claimed one. His place in poker is closer to that of an informed, regular amateur with a famous face, a player who studied the game enough to last into Day 3 of the 2009 Main Event, and whose screen name on PokerStars was simply his own.