Best British Poker Players: UK Legends & Current Stars

Last Updated on October 7, 2026 by Bala Kumar

Ask a room full of poker fans to name a famous British player and you’ll get a dozen different answers depending on when they fell in love with the game. Someone who grew up on late-night TV poker will say Devilfish. A WSOP rail-bird will say Benny Glaser. A high-roller watcher will point straight at Stephen Chidwick.

That range is the story. Britain doesn’t just produce a few strong players; it produces strong players in every era and almost every format: no-limit hold’em, mixed games, online MTTs, super high rollers. Few countries outside the US can say the same.

This guide covers the best British poker players right now, the legends who built the scene, the British female poker players who broke new ground, and what an everyday player can actually learn from each of them.

UK All-Time Money List: The 2026 Snapshot

Before the stories, the numbers. The table below uses the most recent tracked live tournament earnings available at the time of writing (October 2026), drawn from The Hendon Mob and Card Player databases. These totals move every time a player cashes, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a final word.

A quick note for beginners: “live earnings” means gross prize money, not profit. A player who pays $100,000 to enter a tournament and wins $150,000 adds $150,000 to their total, even though they only made $50,000. At high-roller level, many players also sell pieces of their action to backers. So a big number tells you who performs at the highest stakes. It does not tell you who is richest.

The Current Stars of British Poker

Stephen Chidwick: The Quiet Giant

If you only remember one name from this article, make it this one. Stephen Chidwick is Britain’s biggest tournament earner by a huge margin and sits second on the all-time global money list, with tracked live earnings now beyond $79 million.

What makes Chidwick special isn’t one monster score. It’s relentless consistency. He has won Card Player’s Player of the Year award twice (2019 and 2022) and finished inside the top ten again in 2025, collecting almost $12.5 million across 19 final tables that year alone. In May 2026 he was at it again in Monaco, winning a €20,000 event at EPT Monte-Carlo and finishing second in the €100,000 One Drop High Roller for around $1.55 million.

He’s also refreshingly honest about the money. During a January 2026 Reddit AMA, he admitted he doesn’t know his exact net worth, a useful reminder that even the best players think in terms of long-run results, not headline totals.

What you can learn: Chidwick is famous for playing many formats well, including stud and draw games, not just hold’em. Rounding out your game makes you dangerous in more tournaments and less dependent on one format going well.

Ben Heath: From Online Grinder to Triton Regular

Ben Heath from Brighton is the clearest example of a modern British success story. He came up through online tournaments, won his first WSOP bracelet in the $50,000 High Roller in 2019, and has since become a fixture at the most expensive tables in the world.

His biggest moment came in December 2024 at WSOP Paradise, where he finished runner-up in the $500,000 Triton Million for $8,160,000. He followed that with third-place finishes in a $100,000 Triton event in Jeju (2025, $2.22M) and the record-breaking $200,000 Triton Invitational in Montenegro (May 2026, $2.88M). That Montenegro result cemented him as the UK’s number two on the all-time list.

What you can learn: Heath’s path shows that online volume is still the fastest classroom. Thousands of hands teach patterns that would take a decade to see live.

Benny Glaser: The Mixed-Games Master

If Chidwick owns the money list, Benny Glaser owns the bracelet count. The Southampton pro has nine WSOP bracelets, more than any other European player in history.

His last two summers have been extraordinary. In 2025 he won three bracelets in three weeks (Dealer’s Choice, Mixed PLO Hi-Lo, and Mixed Triple Draw Lowball), becoming the first player to win three in a single series entirely in mixed games. Then in June 2026 he won the most prestigious mixed-game title of all, the $50,000 Poker Players Championship, beating a final three that included Josh Arieh and Phil Ivey for $1,343,764.

At 37, he’s still a few years short of Poker Hall of Fame eligibility. Most observers already treat his induction as a question of when, not if.

What you can learn: Glaser found an edge where fields are thinner and less studied. If your local no-limit games are tough, Omaha, stud or mixed games might be where your skills are worth more.

Talal Shakerchi and Sam Trickett: Two Very Different Paths

Talal Shakerchi is a London fund manager who plays poker at the very top level on the side. That’s not a gimmick: he won the $100,000 Triton Vietnam Main Event for $3.25M in 2023, finished second in a $262,500 Triton Invitational for $4.65M the same year, and has a stack of SCOOP and WCOOP titles under the screen name “raidalot.”

Sam Trickett took the opposite route. He was training as a plumber and gas fitter when online poker took over his life. His runner-up finish in the first-ever $1 million buy-in Big One for One Drop in 2012 made him a household name in British poker, and he remains in the UK top four today.

The Legends Who Built British Poker

Today’s stars stand on the shoulders of a colourful older generation.

Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott was the face of British poker for a decade. Gold teeth, sharp suits, “Devilfish” knuckle-dusters and a genuinely elite game. The Hull native won a WSOP bracelet and a World Poker Tour title, and became one of the first stars of televised poker in the UK. He passed away in 2015, but his influence on how poker is presented, as entertainment as well as skill, is still visible.

The Hendon Mob (brothers Barny and Ross Boatman, Joe Beevers and Ram Vaswani) were poker’s first real “brand.” They became famous through early TV poker, later lent their name to the world’s biggest results database, and kept winning. Barny Boatman’s late-career EPT Paris Main Event title proved the old guard can still compete.

Jake Cody from Rochdale completed poker’s Triple Crown (an EPT title, a WPT title and a WSOP bracelet) in just 16 months, finishing it at age 22 in 2011. That’s the fastest Triple Crown on record. Fellow Englishman Roland de Wolfe is also a Triple Crown winner, giving Britain two of the ten members of that club.

Chris Moorman is arguably the greatest online tournament player Britain has produced. He has won tens of millions online and holds a record number of “online triple crowns,” while also adding a WPT title and a WSOP bracelet live.

British Female Poker Players Who Changed the Game

Victoria Coren Mitchell made history twice over. In 2006 she became the first woman to win a European Poker Tour Main Event (EPT London). In 2014 she won EPT Sanremo, becoming the first player of any gender to win two EPT Main Events. She’s also a writer and the host of BBC’s Only Connect, and was inducted into the Women in Poker Hall of Fame in 2016.

Liv Boeree arrived in poker almost by accident, through a 2005 reality TV show, and holds an astrophysics degree from Manchester. She won EPT Sanremo in 2010 for €1.25 million and later a WSOP bracelet, making her the only woman with both an EPT title and a bracelet. Although she stepped back from full-time play in 2019, a $2.8 million score at WSOP Paradise in December 2024 pushed her live earnings to around $6.7 million. That cash is widely reported as the largest single tournament payout ever by a woman.

Both women are a big reason the UK has a more visible female poker community than most countries, and both are excellent examples of thinking about poker as decision-making rather than gambling.

Head-to-Head: Three Styles of British Success

Why Britain Produces So Many Great Players

A few things have worked in the UK’s favour for over two decades.

•       Early TV exposure. British TV broadcast poker with hole-card cameras before most of the world, creating fans long before the global boom.

•       A legal, regulated market. Online and live poker are legal and licensed in the UK, so players can learn openly and grind serious volume.

•       A busy live circuit. Events like the GUKPT, UK Poker Championships and UK Poker League run all year at buy-ins from £60 upward, giving new players a path from local festivals to the EPT.

•       Proximity to Europe. EPT, Triton and WSOP Europe stops are a short flight away, so British pros play against elite fields constantly.

Practical Takeaways for Your Own Game

1.      Judge yourself on decisions, not results. Every player above has had months where they lost. Chidwick’s comments about net worth show that even the best focus on the long run.

2.      Pick your games carefully. Glaser’s success came partly from choosing formats where his edge was biggest. Do the same with stakes and formats.

3.      Build volume online, then test it live. Heath, Cody and Moorman all developed their games through online hands first.

4.      Manage your bankroll. If the pros sell action to reduce variance at the top, you should certainly keep buy-ins small relative to your bankroll.

5.      Study more than hold’em. Even a basic understanding of Omaha or stud improves your thinking about hand strength and equity.

Final Thoughts

British poker is in rude health. Chidwick is chasing the top of the world money list, Heath keeps going deep in the biggest tournaments ever run, and Glaser is rewriting the European record book one bracelet at a time. Behind them sits a remarkable history: Devilfish’s swagger, the Hendon Mob’s showmanship, Cody’s lightning-fast Triple Crown, and two women, Victoria Coren Mitchell and Liv Boeree, who changed perceptions of who belongs at the final table.

Whether you’re just learning hand rankings or grinding online MTTs, there’s a British player whose path looks a lot like the one you could take.

FAQs

Bala Kumar

Founder of PokerClubGames.com and a Poker Researcher with 10+ years of experience in SEO, WordPress development, and gaming content strategy. Specializes in researching online poker sites, poker apps, tournaments, bonuses, and poker strategies. Experienced in poker platform reviews, affiliate marketing, and creating SEO-focused poker content for global audiences.

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