In 2017 the UK Supreme Court ruled that Phil Ivey was not entitled to the £7.7 million he had won playing punto banco at Crockfords casino in London in 2012. The judges found that edge-sorting, his method of reading tiny printing flaws on the backs of the cards, was cheating under civil law. It was one of the costliest legal defeats any poker player has suffered, and it happened away from a poker table.
The case is a good way into the question of who the richest poker players are. The big money is often made, and sometimes lost, outside the game.
Swipe the table
| Player | Where the wealth comes from | Public poker anchor |
|---|---|---|
| Chamath Palihapitiya | Technology investing | High-stakes cash games |
| Bill Perkins | Energy trading | High-roller tournaments, staking |
| Phil Ivey | Poker and casino games | Ten WSOP bracelets |
| Daniel Negreanu | Poker, sponsorship, media | Over $40 million in live earnings |
| Phil Hellmuth | Poker, media, endorsements | Record number of WSOP bracelets |
| Tony G | Business and politics | High-stakes cash, early TV poker |
No published net worth for any of these players has been verified. The figures you see online are estimates, and they disagree with each other by wide margins. Even live earnings, the one public number, measure prizes and not profit, and the costs behind them are set out in the piece on why you will never make a living playing live poker.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Palihapitiya is the wealthiest person on this list by a distance, and he is not a professional poker player at all. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Canada, he was an early senior executive at Facebook, then founded the venture firm Social Capital. Business publications have put his fortune around the billion-dollar mark at various points, and he is known to a wider audience as one of the hosts of the All-In podcast.
At the table, he is a regular in high-stakes private and televised cash games. He is the clearest example of a pattern that defines modern high-stakes poker: the biggest games exist because wealthy amateurs want to play against the best.
Bill Perkins
Perkins made his fortune as an energy trader and hedge fund manager, and he wrote the 2020 book Die With Zero, which argues for spending money on experiences while you are alive to enjoy them. He applies the idea at the poker table. He plays high-roller tournaments, has staked other players and has turned up in some of the most expensive fields in the game.
Like Palihapitiya, Perkins shows that wealth and poker earnings are different measures. His tournament results are public on The Hendon Mob; the trading fortune behind them is not.
Phil Ivey
Among players whose money came mainly from poker, Ivey is the name most often put at the top. He has ten WSOP bracelets, entered the Poker Hall of Fame in 2017, and has played the highest cash games in the world for two decades, from the Big Game at Bellagio to private games in Asia.
His fortune has also taken heavy hits. Beyond the Crockfords case, Borgata in Atlantic City won a US court judgment for about $10 million over baccarat sessions using the same edge-sorting technique. The disputes show how exposed even the most successful player is to a single bad outcome. For a fortune built at the tables alone, the closer comparison is Michael Mizrachi, whose $10,000,000 Main Event prize in 2025 came after twenty years on the circuit.
Daniel Negreanu
As of mid-2026, The Hendon Mob lists Negreanu’s live tournament earnings above $40 million, near the top of the all-time list. He won his seventh WSOP bracelet in the $50,000 Poker Players Championship in 2024.
His income has never relied on prizes alone. He was PokerStars’ best-known ambassador for more than a decade, then joined GGPoker as an ambassador in 2020. He has built a media business around vlogs, podcasts and his training content. Negreanu has also been unusually open about his results, publishing yearly profit and loss figures for his tournament play, which gives fans a rare view of how big wins and big losses net out.
Phil Hellmuth
Hellmuth won the WSOP Main Event in 1989, at 24, and has added bracelets ever since. He holds the record for WSOP bracelets and went into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2007.
Like Negreanu, he has turned fame into income through books, endorsements and media. PokerGO’s High Stakes Duel, a heads-up series in which he played several well-known opponents, kept him on screen in his fifties. His public brand, the “Poker Brat”, is as much a commercial asset as his tournament record.
Tony G
Antanas Guoga, known in poker as Tony G, is a Lithuanian-Australian player and businessman. He was a high-stakes cash and tournament regular during the televised boom, famous for his table talk, and he later went into politics, winning election to the European Parliament for Lithuania in 2014. His business interests reach well beyond poker. The profile of Tony G’s net worth and career covers how those pieces fit together.
Sam Farha, Dan Bilzerian and the names that come up
Two other names appear in almost every discussion of rich poker players.
Sam Farha, the Lebanese-born Las Vegas pro, finished second to Chris Moneymaker in the 2003 WSOP Main Event, the result that launched the poker boom. He is best known as a high-stakes cash game player, and with his unlit cigarette and loose style he became one of the most recognizable faces of early televised poker. There is no reliable public figure for his net worth.
Dan Bilzerian is the reverse case: a famous name with a large claimed poker income and a small public tournament record. His money is linked to family wealth and his business ventures, including the Ignite brand. If you want a list ranked by what can actually be checked, the place to start is the all-time live earnings list on The Hendon Mob, where high-roller specialists such as Justin Bonomo, Bryn Kenney and Stephen Chidwick have traded places at the top in recent years.