Asked before the game who the fish was, Lily Kiletto did not hesitate. “I nominate myself as the biggest ‘fish’ in this game,” she said. The game was an all-women cash table for Poker Night in America, filmed at Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida, on December 2, 2014, and aired on Fox Sports 1 the following year. She planned to buy in for the $20,000 table maximum.
The line was self-deprecating, and it was also accurate in a narrow sense. Kiletto was a tournament player. She had played ladies’ tournaments before, but never an all-women cash game, and cash poker rewards a different set of habits. What she did have was a tournament record that had arrived unusually fast.
The gap between the two formats is real.
In a tournament, chips have no cash value, the blinds rise on a clock, and survival matters as much as each pot; a player can fold for an hour and still make the money. In a cash game every chip is a dollar, you can reload or leave at any time, and the same opponents sit across from you for hours, which gives the better regulars time to find your tendencies. Tournament specialists often feel exposed at a deep-stacked cash table, and a televised one with a $20,000 maximum buy-in is about as deep as a recreational lineup gets. For a sober look at what living off those games involves, see why few players make a living at live poker.
Early life: dealing blackjack and studying fashion
Kiletto’s route into poker ran through the dealer’s side of the table. At 18, while studying finance in college, she took a job dealing blackjack in a casino. She dealt for about two years. She then put money into a few stock options and changed direction, switching her studies to fashion design at FIDM, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.
Two years on a casino floor is a quiet education in gambling. A dealer watches thousands of decisions a week, learns how players behave when they win and lose, and sees the math of the house edge play out in real money. If you have ever sat at a blackjack table and wondered what the dealer thinks of your play, Kiletto has been on that side of it.
Her business life has continued alongside poker. She has been reported as a co-owner of a mortgage company with operations in several states, and on social media she built a following around travel and modeling content.
Second place in her third tournament
Kiletto’s poker career started with a result most players never reach. At the 2013 WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open at Seminole Casino Coconut Creek in South Florida, in what her biography describes as only the third tournament she had entered, she finished second for $191,880.
It was not a one-off. Later in 2013 she finished fifth at WPT Montreal for $129,543, and in 2014 she was runner-up at a Heartland Poker Tour event for $55,607. Two WPT final tables in a single year, early in a career, marked her as a serious tournament player and not a lucky newcomer.
A decade of tournament poker
The years since have been the ordinary life of a working tournament player: a large number of cashes, mostly modest, with occasional deep runs. Card Player’s database records more than 130 tournament cashes as of mid-2026, and the WSOP’s own records list dozens of cashes at the World Series and on the WSOP Circuit, including six final tables, without a bracelet or ring.
The deep runs have kept coming. In September 2025 she finished second in a $3,300 no-limit hold’em event on the PGT schedule at The Venetian in Las Vegas for $170,000. In February 2026 she made the final table of a $5,000 WPT event at the Las Vegas Spring Festival, finishing fourth for $151,000. She also led the field at one stage of the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown Championship in 2025, a short drive from where her WPT career had started.
Her schedule mixes the major series with regional stops: WPT festivals, WSOP Circuit events, the Wynn Summer Classic and WSOP online events. That is a common pattern for players who keep another career going, since a busy regional calendar lets you choose events by buy-in and location. If you are looking for that kind of schedule close to home, this guide to finding local poker covers how card rooms and series list their events.
What her earnings actually show
There is no verified net worth for Lily Kiletto. Her recorded live tournament earnings stood at about $1.57 million as of mid-2026, according to Card Player, with The Hendon Mob showing a similar figure. The WSOP’s database, which counts only WSOP-branded events, puts her at a little under $950,000.
Those totals are gross. They do not subtract buy-ins, which add up quickly over more than a hundred tournaments a decade, or travel to Las Vegas, Florida and beyond. A player can post a seven-figure lifetime total and have a much smaller profit. Her mortgage business, meanwhile, is private, so its contribution is unknown. For context on the far end of the scale, see the richest poker players and their net worth.
The names people search
Her name is often misspelled as “Lilly,” and her age is one of the most common questions about her. Kiletto has kept her birth date out of the tour biographies, and the databases list results, not birthdays. Her career timeline is the part that is on the record: a dealer at 18, a WPT runner-up in 2013, and a fourth-place finish at a $5,000 WPT final table in Las Vegas in February 2026, thirteen years after the first one.