The hand aired in July 2025 on Hellmuth’s Home Game, the Poker Night in America show. Blinds were $25-$50 with a $50 big blind ante. Phil Hellmuth held pocket aces. Kelly Minkin held six-four of clubs. The flop came ten, six, six, giving her trips and leaving Hellmuth 11 percent to win the hand. When the money went in she took her time showing him the bad news, and a slowroll of Hellmuth on a televised home game was always going to travel.
That same month she announced that she was retiring from professional poker. “If poker has taught me anything,” she said, “it’s to always bet on yourself when you have an edge.”
From biology to the bar
Minkin was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and grew up in Milwaukee before her family moved to Phoenix when she was eight. She has two brothers. At the University of Arizona she studied molecular and cellular biology with medical school in mind. As graduation neared she changed course, enrolled at Arizona Summit Law School, and passed the bar.
She was admitted to practice in Arizona in 2015 and joined Kent and Wittekind in Phoenix, defending medical malpractice cases. The firm let her fit tournaments around her caseload, an arrangement she described as the reason she could keep both careers going. “The key to happiness and success is balance,” she told Card Player during that first big run.
Her poker started in college, with casual limit hold’em sessions in local casinos. She moved up in stakes gradually. Her father pushed her to enter the 2013 Arizona State Poker Championship, and she finished second for $151,983. It was the first result that made people outside Arizona notice.
The 2015 breakout
The year she started practicing law was also her biggest year at the tables. In January 2015 she cashed for $54,630 in a $500 event at the L.A. Poker Classic. A month later she reached the final table of the $3,500 WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open in Florida and finished third for $262,912, still the largest cash of her career. She came close to becoming the first woman to win an open World Poker Tour main event.
That summer she outlasted every other woman in the WSOP Main Event and finished 29th for $211,821. Four years later she did it again. In 2019, in a field of 8,569 entries, the second-largest at the time, she was the last woman standing for a second time, going out 50th for $156,265. That put her alongside Maria Ho, Annie Duke and Gaelle Baumann as the only women to finish as the top female in the Main Event twice.
Swipe the table
| Year | Event | Finish | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Arizona State Poker Championship | 2nd | $151,983 |
| 2015 | WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open | 3rd | $262,912 |
| 2015 | WSOP Main Event | 29th | $211,821 |
| 2019 | WSOP Main Event | 50th | $156,265 |
Tournaments were only part of it. Minkin also became a familiar face on streamed cash games. In one Halloween special on the Live at the Bike stream, she won a pot of about $23,000 holding seven-deuce suited, the worst starting hand in hold’em, after making backdoor trips on the turn and river. Viewers who know their hand rankings will appreciate how unlikely that run-out was. Her legal background followed her into the game as well: she worked as a poker advocate for the VerStandig Law Firm.
The 2021 dispute
Minkin’s profile also made her a target. During the 2021 WSOP, pro Adam Hendrix posted that a player had unregistered from Day 1 of Event #15, the $1,500 6-Handed No-Limit Hold’em, then re-registered to dodge a tough starting table. The rules forbid table shopping, and Minkin publicly identified herself as the player he meant.
Her account was different. She said she had unregistered because of a personal conflict with another player at the table, waited hours before re-entering and had not been told re-registering was not allowed. JB Bryan and another player at the table backed her version. Tournament staff, using the broad discretion the WSOP rules give them, found her conduct reasonable and not an angle shoot, and Hendrix later retracted the accusation.
Fashion, a law firm and a third company
The fashion line in Minkin’s story is Triple Barrel, the high-end poker clothing company she founded. The name is a poker term for betting on the flop, turn and river, and the range covers hoodies, tees, crewnecks, joggers, shorts, hats and accessories. If you have watched a stream from a big series in the last few years, you will have noticed that players’ clothing has become part of the show, and Minkin has long been active on social media under the handle The_Illest.
Her legal career has also moved on. She now runs her own practice, Kelly J. Lucas, PLLC, in Phoenix, handling business formation and governance, personal injury and commercial disputes. Lucas is her married name, and recent databases list her as Kelly Lucas. PokerNews notes that she became a mother in 2021. In her retirement announcement she also named Fukui Labs, a company she co-founded that works at the intersection of blockchain and AI.
Net worth beside a law practice and three businesses
As of mid-2025, Card Player put her live tournament winnings at about $1.6 million. That is a gross figure: it counts every prize and subtracts no buy-ins, travel costs or shares sold to backers. It also says nothing about what a decade of legal work and three businesses have earned her, none of which is public.
So any net worth printed for Minkin is a guess built on the one public number. Poker gave her a strong side income and a public profile. Most of her financial life sits in places a results database cannot see. This site’s look at the richest poker players shows how wide the gap between tracked winnings and real wealth can be, and the math in why live poker rarely pays a living explains why so many strong players keep a second career.
The databases that track her 2015 and 2019 runs now list the player under Lucas, the same name that is on the door of her Phoenix law firm.