Poker Leaderboard: The Best Of The Michaels

With Mike Watson making poker history recently as just the third player to win multiple European Poker Tour main event titles, we thought it might be a good time to take a look at where the Canadian poker pro stands in one of the most prestigious of poker leaderboards: the best players named Michael.

When ordered by lifetime tournament earnings, Watson currently sits in second place with more than $20.2 million. The multi-time EPT champion and World Poker Tour main event winner also has another $12.7 million in recorded online earnings, which aren’t accounted for on this list. It would have been enough to put him ahead of top-ranked Michael Addamo, if the Australian didn’t have an impressive online résumé of his own.

Addamo has nearly $25.5 million in recorded earnings, including four World Series of Poker gold bracelets and the $300,000 buy-in 2021 Super High Roller Bowl, which saw him earn more than $3.4 million.

Sitting in third place is two-time WPT champion and five-time bracelet winner Michael Mizrachi. The man known to many as ‘The Grinder’ has accumulated nearly $17.3 million in career earnings. He also has the distinction of being the only three-time winner of the WSOP $50,000 Poker Players Championship event, having hoisted the Chip Reese Memorial Trophy in 2010, 2012, and 2018. His largest-ever payday came when he finished fifth in the 2010 WSOP main event for just over $2.3 million.

There are many other highly-accomplished Michaels on this list, including all-time EPT main event earnings leader Mike McDonald, current high roller regular Michael Soyza, four-time bracelet winner Mike Matusow, bracelet winner and WPT champion Mike Leah, 2006 WSOP main event third-place finisher Michael Binger, the late Hall of Famer Mike Sexton, and two-time bracelet winner Michael Wang. ♠