In 2006 Victoria Coren won the European Poker Tour Main Event in London and a first prize of £500,000. She was the first woman to win an EPT Main Event. Eight years later, in Sanremo, she won another, and became the first player of either sex to win two.
By then she was already a household name in Britain, though not because of poker. That is the key to her finances: the poker titles are the famous part, and the smaller part.
A writer first
Coren was born in London in 1972, the daughter of the humorist Alan Coren and the sister of the journalist and critic Giles Coren. She began writing for national newspapers as a teenager and has kept a column going in one paper or another for most of her adult life, including a long run at The Observer.
That steady writing income is unglamorous and almost never mentioned in the net-worth articles, but it is decades long. Add books to it. Her poker memoir, For Richer, For Poorer, was published in 2009 and told the story of her years in London’s card rooms and private games, long before poker was on prime-time television.
Late Night Poker and the British boom
British television got to televised poker early. Channel 4’s Late Night Poker, launched at the end of the 1990s, used under-the-table cameras to show the players’ hole cards, years before the format became standard in the United States. Coren worked on the show and played in the scene it grew out of, alongside players such as the Hendon Mob group whose name now belongs to poker’s main results database.
If you only know the American story of the poker boom, the history of poker in Britain is worth a look. The game had a lively London scene, a cast of colorful regulars and a television audience before Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 win changed things across the Atlantic.
The EPT titles
The European Poker Tour, launched by PokerStars in 2004, was the circuit where Coren’s poker career peaked.
Her 2006 London win came when the EPT was still young and the fields were a fraction of today’s sizes, but it was a strong professional field, and she went on to play as a PokerStars-sponsored pro. She also worked on the tour’s television coverage as a presenter and commentator.
Being the first woman to win an EPT Main Event mattered beyond the prize. Women made up a small share of tournament fields in 2006, as they still do, and her win came at a moment when European television was turning live poker into a regular show. A champion who could also write and broadcast about the game was valuable to the tour, and she became one of its best-known faces.
The 2014 win in Sanremo was arguably the harder one. By then the EPT drew huge fields of internet-trained players, the standard of play had risen sharply, and no one had won two Main Events. She did.
The two titles are the core of her live tournament record. As of mid-2026, The Hendon Mob lists her lifetime live earnings in the low millions of dollars, a solid professional record but far from the top of any money list.
Leaving PokerStars
Later in 2014, she ended her sponsorship with PokerStars. The site, by then under new ownership after Isai Scheinberg’s family sold it, had started offering casino games, and she said she did not want to promote them. For her, poker was a game of skill between players and casino games were something else. The story of the company before that sale is in the profile of Isai Scheinberg.
The decision cost her a sponsorship fee at a time when sponsored pros were well paid. It also fit the public character she had built: a player who loved the game and wrote honestly about its downsides.
Only Connect and the television income
The biggest part of her earnings almost certainly comes from television. Since 2008 she has hosted Only Connect, the BBC quiz built around finding links between clues. It began on BBC Four and later moved to BBC Two, and her dry, quick hosting became the show’s signature. The quiz is famous for the Connecting Wall, a grid of sixteen clues that teams must sort into four groups against the clock, and for questions hard enough that the host’s jokes are often the only easy part. Poker players will recognize the skill it rewards: spotting a pattern under pressure while ignoring the red herrings. She has presented other programs, including the BBC Two series Balderdash and Piffle about the origins of words, and she has appeared across British panel and comedy shows.
Long-running presenter roles are the most dependable income in British television. They also bring the side work that follows a familiar face: guest appearances, events and books.
How the money adds up
None of these figures are published, but the shape is clear:
Swipe the table
| Source | Public? | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Television presenting | No | Probably the largest share |
| Newspaper columns and books | No | Steady, decades long |
| Live poker results | Yes | Two EPT titles, low millions in prizes |
| Former PokerStars sponsorship | No | Ended in 2014 |
Any single net-worth figure you see for her is an estimate. She is wealthy by the standards of British broadcasters and writers, and poker contributed fame and a meaningful sum without being the main source. The pattern is familiar from players whose wealth came from business, such as Tony G: the poker results are real, and the bank balance was built elsewhere.
One more piece is often folded into the estimates, and it should not be. She married the comedian and writer David Mitchell in 2012, and articles about her fortune regularly add his television career to hers. Their household finances are private, and nothing public says how they are shared.