The All-Time Money List

It’s hard to tell where it started. Sometime in 2017, one man began his blazing hot march up the all-time money list. He was sitting around $16 million in total cashes and then he just started winning everything, it seemed. Super High Roller after Super High Roller, Justin Bonomo has added about $26 million in cashes to his previous $16 million and is now sitting at total live earnings of $42,979,591.

Through a combination of hard work, good play, good luck (he’s admitted this in social media posts and interviews all along), and the help of his friends and family, he’s done something that wasn’t at all possible not that long ago. He’s vaulted from somewhere around 30th place to first in record time because he plays astronomical buy-ins and plays them well.

It’s an impressive feat and all kudos to Justin. He’s someone that I like and admire for nothing to do with poker. He’s willing to speak his mind on his feelings about things that many people are not willing to talk about. He is proud of his accomplishments and seems to be proud of who he is. I’m proud to have called him a friend at some point, though we haven’t spoken in a long time other than to say hello. The truth is that he’s at the top of the all-time money list, but it’s unlikely he’s made the most money from tournaments of anybody who’s ever played them.

My guess is that person is Daniel Negreanu. He’s the person most likely to have the biggest percentage of himself in all of the biggest tournaments he’s done well in. Therein lies the problem with the all-time money list in poker. It draws its inspiration from lists in golf or other prize-based games of skill. The main difference being two-fold and very related.

First of all, in golf, almost all of the money is put up by the sponsors of each tournament. Golfers pay a nominal fee to play in each tournament and then they collect their paychecks from the tournament when they do well. Most golfers’ main source of income is the prize money from these tournaments. Some, the most successful ones, make more money from their personal sponsors than they do from playing golf, but that’s neither here nor there. In general, when you see a listing of golfers by money that they’ve earned playing the game of golf specifically, you can be sure that the list is accurate because that money comes from sponsors. In other words, you don’t really need to know what their net profit is because it’s all out there.

In poker, a player could cash for $100,000 in a year and very easily have a losing year if they play tournaments for a living. The prize pools are generated from the buy-ins and very little money, if any, is added to prize pools to supplement player buy-ins. Unless players start publishing their total buy-ins for the year, there’s no way of knowing how much money they’ve made in a year. And that’s not even considering all the money they spend on flights and hotel rooms.

Second, because poker players are well-versed in the perils of risk in poker tournaments, almost all of the people who are playing tournaments for a living or partially for a living, offload their risk onto others. I’ve discussed my arrangement in a recent article and I’ve also discussed how many other poker players sell action to others in myriad ways. Because of this, and because these things are almost never disclosed, it’s impossible to know, for instance, how much of the $1 million buy-in tournament that Justin recently won was paid for by him and how much was paid for by others.

I support, wholeheartedly, every poker player’s ability to allow some of the risk they would normally bear to be shouldered by others. It’s smart bankroll management and smart emotional management as well. In golf tournaments, golfers give some of their purses to their caddies and possibly to coaches if they have such an arrangement, but the prize money outside of that is kept for themselves. This is another clear way that the two lists differ.

I’ve gone through my figures in the past in an article, but, of the roughly $5 million that I’ve cashed for in my career, I’ve profited between $2 and $2.5 million before taxes. Obviously, that’s great, but if someone were to look me up on Card Player to see how much I’ve won, they would think it’s much higher, and I’ve never played a tournament with less than 45 percent of my own action.

I think it’s good to look at a glance and have a rough idea of how successful poker players have been in tournaments relative to each-other. It is not, however a real list of how much money people have made from poker. I’m not suggesting that all poker players should be publishing how much they have made, merely noticing that the all-time money list should be taken in with a generous helping of curiosity and perhaps a grain or two of salt. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG