At the 2021 World Series of Poker, a 70-year-old Hall of Famer sat at the final table of the $10,000 Seven Card Stud Championship and finished fifth for $40,284. Most of the players around him knew Jack McClelland from the other side of the rope, as the man who had once run the whole event. Four years later, on August 18, 2025, he died at the age of 74.
The World Series of Poker and PokerGO announced his death the same day. PokerGO called him “a giant”, and the WSOP’s short notice listed the three things he had been: tournament director, poker player, and 2014 Poker Hall of Fame inductee. No cause of death was published. He had been in hospital for the three weeks before he died and had dealt with health problems for several years, including a heart transplant after his retirement.
A stud player first
McClelland was born in 1951. He liked to say he learned poker from his grandmother, playing Seven Card Stud for a two-cent ante and nickel limits, and that he was “kept broke until I was ten years old because I couldn’t throw a hand away.” Before poker became his job he was a semi-professional bowler.
He came into the casino business through the dealing box. He worked as a dealer and then as a shift manager, which in the 1970s and early 1980s meant learning card room procedure in an industry that had very little written down. Tournament poker, in those years, was mostly a once-a-year event in downtown Las Vegas.
Running the World Series at Binion’s
That event was the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe. McClelland joined its staff and served as its tournament director across the 1980s and 1990s. He was also its voice: from 1987 to 1999 he announced the tournaments, calling out seat draws, breaks and the final hands of bracelet events in the cramped downtown room.
The job was different then. There was no standard rulebook shared across casinos, no tournament software and no live stream to replay a disputed hand. A director made decisions on the floor and had to make them stick with players who were often the best and most stubborn in the world. The reputation McClelland built for fair, quick rulings came out of that era, when a tournament director’s credibility was the main thing holding an event together.
The series was small by modern standards, with a Main Event field counted in the hundreds, and it felt personal. The director was known to every player by name, and the players knew that the person making a ruling would still be standing there the next morning.
Bellagio and the World Poker Tour
In 2002 McClelland moved to Bellagio. He was its tournament director until he retired in 2013. The timing put him at the center of the boom. The World Poker Tour launched on television in 2003, and Bellagio was one of its signature venues, hosting the Five Diamond World Poker Classic and the WPT World Championship.
For millions of viewers who discovered poker in those years, the setting was Bellagio’s tournament room, and the man running it was McClelland. The same room was becoming the high-stakes center of the Strip, with its private game named after Bobby Baldwin drawing the biggest cash players in the city, so the tournament side had to hold its own next to some of the most closely watched tables in poker. He also worked with the WPT in its early seasons, when a live tournament first had to run to the needs of a television crew, with final tables that had to fit a broadcast.
For more on how the game moved from those card rooms to a televised sport, the site’s poker history traces the line from Binion’s to the modern circuits.
The Hall of Fame and a long retirement at the tables
The Poker Hall of Fame inducted McClelland in 2014, a year after he left Bellagio. He went in alongside Daniel Negreanu, as a contributor recognized for building the game, not for his results as a player. The pairing was fitting. It put the most famous player of the boom era beside the director who had run many of its biggest rooms.
Retirement did not take him away from the felt. He played regularly in Las Vegas, both cash games and tournaments, and the 2021 Stud Championship final table showed he could still compete at the top level in the game his grandmother had taught him. In 2025 he cashed in daily $200 tournaments around the city more than a dozen times, the kind of small events where regulars knew exactly who they were playing next to.
Phil Hellmuth, posting the day the news broke, wrote that McClelland had been the best poker tournament director of all time and that he had helped innovate at both the WPT and the WSOP. If you want to understand why tournament floors today run the way they do, with consistent rules across venues and a director whose word is final, much of it was worked out by people of his generation, in rooms like Binion’s and Bellagio. For the people who learned the game on those early WPT broadcasts, his voice on the Bellagio microphone remains part of the memory, and a social game that grew around him lost one of its best-known regulars that August.