The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Winning the WSOP Main Event

^{Greg Raymer, 2004 WSOP Main Event winner, is one of the most successful (and recognizable) champions in history. But not all winners have had the same luck as him. (Photo: Greg Raymer / X.com)}

We are days away from crowning poker’s latest World Champion, with nine men set to square off for that historic title in the World Series of Poker $10,000 Championship Event – the Main Event, as it has become known. 

Over the 57-year history of the WSOP Main Event, there have been 53 different winners. Only two women, Barbara Enright in 1995 and Leo Margets in 2025, have made the final table and earned notoriety for reaching that stage. 

But what does winning the Main Event actually do for a player after they win? For many winners, that victory has brought them the highest accolades in the power world. The fame, financial windfall from the grand prize, and seat among poker legends make it a defining highlight of a player’s life. 

But for others, it’s been a curse, giving them fame they couldn’t sustain, controversy in the public eye, or worse. Like most things in life, winning poker’s biggest prize can be a toss-up between the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

The Good…

Let’s face it: winning millions of dollars, or even hundreds of thousands in the early days, is a huge windfall for a person. In 2026, the players are vying for the $10 million first-place prize (and varying amounts down the ladder), which is a life-changing sum of money. Some players who have won the WSOP Main Event have been able to completely change their lives through that single victory. 

Perhaps no better illustration of this can be found than in the 2003 WSOP Main Event. In that tournament, a young accountant who had never stepped foot into a live tournament stood his ground against some of the best players in the game, including Dan Harrington, Josh Arieh, the late Amir Vahedi, and eventual runner-up Sam Farha. 

That young man, with the unlikely name Chris Moneymaker, shocked the poker world by winning the tournament. He not only changed the way the game was looked at, but his own world changed completely. Gone were the mundane days of spreadsheets and calculations for Moneymaker; suddenly, he was the poster boy for the “poker boom” of the mid-Aughts, a wave he’s been riding ever since that victory. 

Chris Moneymaker's 2003 Main Event victory helped spark the 'poker boom' by inspiring a new generation of players to chase a WSOP win. (Photo: courtesy of the WSOP)

Today, Moneymaker is still highly respected in the poker world. He’s a Poker Hall of Fame inductee with his own namesake tour, the Moneymaker Poker Tour. He’s arguably made millions beyond the $2.5 million he won in 2003, though he allegedly surrendered half of that Moneymaker to the backers who covered half his $10,000 entry, which he'd won through a satellite on PokerStars. That’s a rather good outcome for what winning the Main Event can do for a player. 

The same story applies to the next two men who followed Moneymaker into the history books. Greg Raymer was a patent attorney with a side hobby in tournament poker before his huge 2004 win earned him a $5 million payday. He has also remained in the poker limelight and is considered an elder statesman of the game. 

Joe Hachem helped elevate the world of poker in his native country of Australia with his 2005 win, and he has also earned millions beyond his $7.5 million windfall that day. 

While all those stories are nice, there is one player who captured the World Championship title and made it his brand. 24-year-old Phil Hellmuth was still wet behind the ears when he made the final table of the 1989 WSOP Main Event. He would go on to win the World Championship, denying Johnny Chan a never-before-done three-peat.

That win gave him his first WSOP bracelet, and it would catapult him into poker immortality. Since then, Hellmuth has added another 16 bracelets to his collection and built up a life that is immensely better than the “college dropout” he was back then. 

…The Bad…

People believe that winning the WSOP Main Event guarantees a lifetime of accolades and a permanent place in the game, but that’s not necessarily the case for everyone. Some champions took their sizable chunk of money and…left. 

They either decided that they had reached the pinnacle achievement in poker (because seriously…where do you go after winning the Main Event?) In other cases, they wanted something different from life than grinding cards for a living, which is a very difficult way to make a living indeed.

Germany’s Pius Heinz, the 2011 World Champion, is a perfect example of this. In only his second tournament cash, Heinz won the Main Event and scored over $8.7 million for the victory. He would stick around the periphery of the poker world for another eight years, adding eleven more cashes on his poker resume before seemingly retiring from the game in 2019.

2008 Main Event champion Peter Eastgate from Denmark has a similar story. After winning the tournament and a $9.1 million score, Eastgate would only play for another year and a half before stepping away. At the time, he said he had “lost his motivation” for the game, but came back briefly in 2011. Despite the short return, his Hendon Mob page shows his last tournament win dated all the way back to 2013. 

2008 Main Event winner Peter Eastgate is one of the youngest WSOP champions, but retired from professional poker just a few years later. (Photo: Isaac Brekken / AP)

Finally, there is perhaps no other example of “the bad” more than Jonathan Tamayo, the 2024 Main Event winner. Tamayo won the Main Event that year and the $10 million first-place prize, but tarnished his victory by allegedly using poker-solver software on the rail. 

Jonathan Tamayo's 2024 WSOP Main Event victory later came under scrutiny due to allegations of using rail-side strategy assistance at the final table.(Photo: Louis Grasse / PX Imagens via ZUMA Press Wire)

These solvers, who were employed by his backers, allowed his rail to pass information to him during the tournament that other players did not have. Though no rule technically prohibited it at the time, the incident permanently stained Tamayo’s victory. He’s continued to lie low in the poker world, despite earning six figures in both 2025 and 2026. 

…and The Ugly

You would think that winning the WSOP Main Event would be a lifelong point of pride. For some, however, winning was detrimental to their lives rather than the glory it should have been. 

One case of this is the 1979 World Champion Hal Fowler, who was recognized as the first “amateur player” ever to win the Main Event. Fowler won against a final table that included Poker Hall of Famer Crandell Addington, “the Grand Old Man” of poker Johnny Moss, and runner-up Bobby Hoff. But Fowler was always criticized for his lack of skills at that final table, turning a gutshot straight draw into a winning hand against Hoff’s pocket Aces.

Hal Fowler was one of the tournament's earliest amateur champions when he won the 1979 WSOP Main Event, proving recreational players could compete with poker's elite.(Photo: WSOP / X.com)

The pressures of the title would weigh on Fowler heavily for the rest of his life. He would only cash in three more tournaments after that (admittedly, recordkeeping is rough in that era), with the last one coming in 1984. He suffered from diabetes and eventually passed away from those conditions quietly in 2000.

The other unfortunate tale is that of Stu Ungar, one of poker’s legends. A back-to-back champion in 1980 and 1981, Ungar was a drug addict whose greater days were behind him by 1997. Billy Baxter wanted to give “The Kid” a final shot at glory, however, thinking that it would help him kick his drug addiction. 

The late Stu Ungar won the WSOP Main Event three times in his career. He regarded as one of the greatest poker players ever with a tragic ending to his story. (Photo: Stefanie Ungar / Instagram @stefanieungar)

Ungar, by all appearances, played an outstanding game on his way to crushing the 1997 WSOP Main Event final table and winning his third bracelet. But when it came time to defend his title in 1998, Ungar’s demons had returned. Baxter offered to pony up the $10K entry fee for Ungar, but he claimed illness and never showed. On November 28, 1998, he died unceremoniously in a Las Vegas hotel room at just 45 years old. 

Crown or Albatross?

Winning the WSOP Main Event has been for some a crowning achievement that has changed a player’s life, or it has been the albatross that hangs around their neck and brought some less-than-stellar moments into their lives. 

Who among the nine men at the 2026 WSOP Main Event final table is best equipped to manage the windfall and the pressures of becoming the next World Champion? We’ll find out next week, once the Main Event wraps in Las Vegas.