The ace of spades on the turn looked like rescue. Leo Margets was all in with ace-ten of hearts against Kenny Hallaert’s pocket sixes on a board of J-7-5 with two spades, and the ace gave her the lead. Then the nine of spades came on the river. Hallaert held the six of spades, the board had run four spades, and the flush ended the deepest run a woman had made in the WSOP Main Event in thirty years.
Margets finished seventh in the 2025 Main Event for $1,500,000. No woman had ever been paid more in the event. She was the first woman to reach the final table since Barbara Enright in 1995, and only the second in the history of the tournament. “Such an amazing nine days,” she said afterwards. “It’s been so emotional, but at the same time, you have to recompose every time you’re at the table.”
Barcelona, London and a job at IMG
Margets was born in Barcelona on August 10, 1983. She studied at the University of Roehampton in London and took a master’s degree in communication business management, then worked for IMG, the sports and talent management company. Poker became her career in the late 2000s, the years when online poker grew fastest in Spain and the country began producing a steady stream of tournament professionals.
Last woman standing, 2009
Margets first appeared on the international radar at the 2009 WSOP Main Event. She finished 27th, the last woman left in the field, in a year when the tournament drew 6,494 players. That result made her a known name in Spanish poker almost overnight, and it set up the parallel that ran through every story written about her in July 2025: the same tournament, sixteen years apart, with a final table in between that had stayed out of reach for every woman since Enright.
Enright’s own run had come in a very different event. In 1995 she finished fifth in a Main Event of a few hundred players at Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, and in 2007 she became the first woman inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. Margets reached the same stage against a field of thousands, in a tournament now played at the Horseshoe and Paris on the Strip.
Through the 2010s she built a steady record on the European circuit, with 15 cashes on the European Poker Tour, alongside a growing career as a media figure in Spain.
The 2021 bracelet
Her first WSOP title came in the autumn of 2021, the year the series moved from its usual summer dates. Margets won the $1,500 The Closer. It was a late-schedule no-limit hold’em event, and she beat Bulgaria’s Alex Kulev heads-up for $376,850. The win also gave her a distinction that still stood in 2025: she was the most recent woman to win an open-field WSOP event in Las Vegas.
That last point is a reminder of how lopsided the sport remains. Women make up a small share of most open fields, so deep runs are rare by simple arithmetic. If you look at final tables in the major live events, the pattern is easy to see.
Endorsements, books and television
A large part of Margets’ career sits outside the prize pools. As of 2025 she is an ambassador for Winamax, the French operator that also runs a large Spanish site, and coverage of her Main Event run identified her as a member of Team Winamax. Ambassador contracts are rarely disclosed, but for a player with her media profile they are a regular income stream that does not depend on results.
In 2017 she published a book, Play Your Cards Well, which applies lessons from poker to decisions away from the table. She has also become a familiar face on Spanish television. She took part in the reality show Supervivientes in 2014, and in 2023 she won the first Spanish edition of The Traitors, a game of deception in which a poker player’s skill at reading people turned out to be useful. She shared the prize with Joana Pastrana after both reached the end as Faithfuls. Away from screens, she has completed ten marathons.
Net worth beyond the Main Event payout
There is no verified net worth for Leo Margets, and any single figure online is an estimate. The public anchors are clear enough. Her live tournament earnings passed $3.5 million as of August 2025, with the $1,500,000 Main Event payout the largest single result by a wide margin. Before the 2025 series she had a little over $2 million in live cashes.
Those figures are gross. They do not subtract buy-ins, travel or any pieces of her action that were sold to backers, a common practice in the Main Event. On the other side, her ambassador income, book and television work add amounts that are not public. Margets is a successful professional with an unusually broad income base for a poker player, not a high-stakes fortune of the kind discussed in the richest poker players and their net worth.
The impact of the run
The 2025 final table was broadcast live on PokerGO in July, and Margets’ presence turned a Main Event final table into a mainstream story in Spain and well beyond the poker press. She was the only woman among the final nine. The title went to Michael Mizrachi, whose own profile covers the end of that night.
For Margets, the result settled a question from 2009. The last woman standing at 27th had become the seventh-place finisher, 26 places and a final table further on, and the $1,500,000 she collected was the largest Main Event prize any woman has won.