Twenty contestants arrived at Suryagarh Palace in Jaisalmer for the first season of The Traitors India: film actors, television personalities, comedians, influencers. One of them played cards for a living. When the finale streamed on Prime Video on July 3, 2025, that player, Nikita Luther, was one of the two names left at the end, sharing the 70.05 lakh rupee pot with Uorfi Javed.
The show itself, hosted by Karan Johar, is a game of hidden roles and group votes. What made Luther’s run a talking point in India was who she was before it. Indian entertainment press introduced her to a mass audience as a World Series of Poker champion, and poker suddenly had a recognizable face on one of the country’s most talked-about streaming shows.
From a Goa ladies event to a Las Vegas bracelet
Luther grew up in Delhi in a military family, went to Sanskriti School and took a bachelor’s degree at Delhi University. She started playing poker informally around 2015. Her first title came that same year, in the ladies event of the India Poker Championship in Goa, a win worth a few hundred dollars in prize money.
The step up was quick.
In 2017 she won a team event at the Macau Poker Cup with Raghav Bansal and finished fifth in the Aria Poker Classic Main Event in Las Vegas for $65,000. In June 2018 she went to the WSOP at the Rio and found a partner for the $1,000 Tag Team No-Limit Hold’em event over Twitter: Giuseppe Pantaleo, a German professional.
Tag team events (see the poker terms glossary for the format names) let two or more players share one seat, swapping in and out as the tournament runs. The 2018 edition drew 1,032 teams. Luther was playing the $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em event at the same time, finishing 17th in it, and ran between tables during breaks. The pair won the tag team title on June 30, 2018, beating a Japanese trio of Kazuki Ikeuchi, Hiroki Iwata and Sho Mori heads-up. The first prize of $175,805 was split between them. Luther became the first Indian woman to win a WSOP bracelet.
A record built on deep runs
Bracelets get the headlines, but Luther’s record since 2018 is built on deep runs against big fields. The best of them came at the 2023 WSOP Main Event, where she sat among the chip leaders at the end of Day 4 and went on to finish 96th for $78,900. Her cashes span tournaments in Macau, Vietnam, Nepal, Russia, Spain, Czechia and the United States, as well as the major Indian series in Goa.
As of 2026, the PokerNews results database lists a little over $540,000 in live tournament earnings for her. That is a solid professional record for a player from a market where live tournament buy-ins are usually modest, and it places her among the better-known names from the region you can read about in this piece on Asian poker players.
Swipe the table
| Year | Event | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | India Poker Championship Ladies Event, Goa | 1st |
| 2017 | Aria Poker Classic Main Event, Las Vegas | 5th, $65,000 |
| 2018 | WSOP $1,000 Tag Team NLH | 1st, $175,805 (team) |
| 2023 | WSOP Main Event | 96th, $78,900 |
The off-felt work: selling poker as a sport
For much of her career Luther has had a second job in the business of the game. She has served as chief operating officer of the Poker Sports League in India, and works as a mentor at major Indian poker championships. At the time of the show she was also a brand ambassador for Natural8 India, which issued a press statement after the finale under the line that she had used her poker skills to win.
She had been on camera before. In 2023 she appeared on Game of Gold, GGPoker’s reality poker competition, where her team won the first round. She has also given a TED talk on handling uncertainty, which is not a bad summary of what tournament poker asks of anyone who plays it for a living.
That background shaped how her season was covered. Indian outlets described her as the underdog from competitive gaming, eliminated early and back as a wildcard, and then as the dark horse who outplayed a field of celebrities. Very little of that coverage needed to explain what a WSOP bracelet was. The point was simpler: a poker player had read a room of strangers better than they had read her.
Why the format suited a card player
The Traitors is a game of incomplete information. A few players are secretly assigned as Traitors, and the rest have to work out who they are from behavior alone, with a vote every day. There are no cards, no chips and no odds to calculate, but the core skills overlap with poker: watching how people act when they think nobody is paying attention, keeping your own story consistent, and not committing to a read before you need to.
If you have ever sat at a live table, you will know the player who narrates every hand and the player who says almost nothing and still seems to know where everyone stands, two familiar types on the social side of poker. Luther’s public image on the show was much closer to the second.
The law that arrived seven weeks later
Her win landed at an awkward moment for Indian poker. On August 22, 2025, less than two months after the finale, the President signed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, which Parliament had passed in a matter of days. The law bans online games played for money, poker among them, along with the advertising of those games and the bank payments that fund them. Offering such games can bring up to three years in prison and a fine of up to one crore rupees.
The online side felt it at once. By September 2025, reports said WPT Global, one of the last international sites still serving Indian players, was expected to leave the market. For Indian players who had used online play to build bankrolls or win seats abroad, that door shut in the space of a week.
Live poker is a different question. The 2025 Act is aimed at online money games, and casino card rooms in states like Goa operate under state gaming licences. It was in one of those rooms, at the India Poker Championship in 2015, that Luther won her first title.