On July 12, 2025, Day 7 of the WSOP Main Event, Will Kassouf got his chips in with pocket sevens against Kenny Hallaert’s king-five of hearts. The board ran ace, jack, ten, king, jack. Hallaert’s kings-up held, and Kassouf was out in 33rd place for $300,000. Minutes later he was told by tournament director Dennis Jones that he would be escorted to the cage to collect his money, then off the premises, and that he would not be welcome for the remaining days of the 2025 series.
It was the biggest prize of the summer for a player who had built his name on being the most irritating person at the table. It was also the second time in a decade that a Kassouf Main Event run had become the story of the tournament.
From solicitor to the Victoria
William Kassouf was born in London on December 19, 1981. He trained in law and worked as a solicitor before he turned to poker full time in 2013. Long before then he had been a regular at the Grosvenor Victoria Casino in London, the card room most British players simply call the Vic.
His first notable cash came in 2009 at the Irish Poker Tour, where he finished sixth in a €3,200 plus €300 no-limit hold’em event for €100,800. For the next few years he was a well-known face on the British and Irish circuit without being a name outside it.
Nine high like a boss
That changed at the 2016 WSOP Main Event. Kassouf’s style was constant talk: questions, monologues, a running commentary aimed at whoever was in a hand with him. Poker calls it speech play, and it is legal within limits. Kassouf pushed those limits for hours at a time.
The hand that made him famous came against Stacy Matuson. Holding nine-six, he kept up a long stream of talk until she folded pocket queens face up. “Nine high like a boss,” he said, and once the hand aired the line spread far beyond poker. He went on to finish 17th for $338,288.
His exit was just as replayed. Canadian pro Griffin Benger picked up aces against Kassouf’s kings. Before calling, Benger told him to “check your privilege”, and the aces held. To his critics, Kassouf was a player abusing the rules on table talk and time. To others he was the reason they watched.
The Grosvenor episode
Two years later the headlines were less amusing. In September 2018, Shaun Deeb went public with an allegation that Kassouf had palmed a £100 chip belonging to a friend during a drunken roulette session at the Grosvenor casino at Leeds Watergate. On September 18, Kassouf posted an apology on Twitter in which he called it an “error of judgment” and said he and Grosvenor Poker had “mutually agreed to part ways”. Reports at the time said he was also barred from Grosvenor properties.
He kept playing and kept winning smaller events. In May 2022 he took down the €2,200 High Roller at the UKIPT stop in Dublin, beating a 53-player field for €33,410. It was a reminder that underneath the noise was a working tournament player.
The 2025 Main Event
The 2025 run was longer and angrier than 2016. Over the week, Kassouf collected penalties for excessive deliberation and argued with floor staff and opponents. At one point he took a ten-minute tank holding the second nuts. On his final hand he was still trading comments with Pedro Padilha about how long players were taking.
He asked to speak to WSOP vice president Jack Effel after the decision. It did not change. The ban covered the rest of the 2025 WSOP, which ended on July 16. The spectacle split the audience again: some of the crowd applauded him as he left the room, others jeered.
What the record adds up to
Here is where the numbers sit. As of 2025, Kassouf’s live tournament earnings were a little over $2 million, with the two Main Event scores making up nearly a third of that total. He has no WSOP bracelet.
That figure is gross. It counts every prize but subtracts nothing: not the buy-ins for the events he did not cash, not the travel, not any share of his action sold to backers. Any net worth you see quoted for Kassouf is an estimate built on that public number plus guesses about the rest. He has done well from poker by British circuit standards. Nobody outside his own accounts knows his net worth.
For contrast, consider a player from the same generation who rarely makes a headline for anything but results. Kristen Foxen, born in Ontario in 1986, won her sixth WSOP bracelet in June 2026 in the $25,000 High Roller, for $1.77 million. Her tracked live earnings passed $18.9 million that month, the most of any woman. Searches for her net worth turn up the same kind of estimates as his, for the same reason.
Swipe the table
| Player | Live earnings (tracked) | WSOP bracelets |
|---|---|---|
| Will Kassouf | about $2.07 million (2025) | 0 |
| Kristen Foxen | over $18.9 million (June 2026) | 6 |
The gap is not about personality. High-roller tournaments carry far bigger buy-ins and prize pools, and a career spent in them produces far bigger gross totals. If you are trying to judge how well any player is really doing, the totals on this site’s look at the richest poker players and the arithmetic in why live poker rarely pays a living are better guides than a viral clip.
Cleared for 2026
The ban turned out to be a one-year matter. In June 2026, Kassouf told PokerNews that the WSOP had informed him he “can play in all WSOP events worldwide”. He said he would be in Las Vegas from the end of June to mid-July, covering the final three weeks of the series, and he framed his 2025 behavior as a reaction to how he had been treated at the table.
The 2026 Main Event began on July 2 at Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas, and this time the player who had been walked out of the building a year earlier was on the list of those who had said they would be there.