WSOP Main Event winners since 1970

Lucas Jumalon was 22 when he won the 2026 Main Event. He never lost the chip lead at the final table, collected $10,000,000, and became the second-youngest champion in the event's history. That makes 51 different champions on a list that began in 1970 with a single, rather unusual vote.

The World Series of Poker has been held in Las Vegas every year since 1970, and since 1972 its Main Event has been a $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold'em tournament. The winner is informally treated as the world champion of poker for the following twelve months. Below is every champion, followed by the stories behind the numbers. If the game itself is new to you, the Texas hold'em rules explain every street of the hand these players won with.

The Binion's years: from a vote to a million

The first champion was not decided by cards at all. In 1970 the event was a cash game with a fixed start and finish, and at the end Benny Binion asked the players to vote for the best among them. The story goes that everyone voted for themselves, so Binion asked for the second-best player, and Johnny Moss won. From 1971 it became a freeze-out, and Moss won that one too.

For two decades the fields stayed small and almost entirely American. Doyle Brunson won in 1976 and 1977, both times holding ten-deuce, which is why players still call 10-2 a Doyle Brunson. Johnny Chan's second title in 1988 later turned up in the 1998 film Rounders. Then in 1990 Mansour Matloubi, an Iranian-born player based in London, became the first champion from outside the United States. A year later Brad Daugherty received the first $1,000,000 first prize, and that figure stayed fixed until 1999, while the field nearly doubled.

The Moneymaker boom

Chris Moneymaker is the reason the table above changes shape in 2004. He qualified for the 2003 Main Event through an $86 online satellite, beat a field of 839, and took $2,500,000. A satellite qualifier winning the world championship on television did more for the game than any advertising campaign could have: the next year 2,576 players entered, then 5,619 in 2005 and 8,773 in 2006, when Jamie Gold won $12,000,000.

That 2006 field stood as the record for 17 years. Between 2007 and 2018 the field settled between roughly 6,300 and 7,900 entries, and in 2008 the final table was moved to November, a format that ran until 2016 and gave the finalists months to prepare.

Record fields and a strange 2020

The 2020 event is the odd one out. With live poker shut down, it was played online in two halves, one for international players and one for American players, each finishing at a live final table. The two winners then met heads-up in Las Vegas, and Damian Salas of Argentina won the title and $2,550,969 from a combined field of 1,379.

Once the event returned in full, the numbers kept climbing. The 2023 field of 10,043 finally broke the 2006 record, and Daniel Weinman's $12,100,000 became the largest first prize the event has paid. The 2024 Main Event went further still, with 10,112 entries, the biggest field so far; Jonathan Tamayo won it for $10,000,000. The 2025 and 2026 fields, 9,735 and 9,208, were smaller, but both still rank among the largest in the tournament's history.

Back-to-back winners and repeat champions

Four players have won the Main Event in consecutive years: Johnny Moss (1970-71), Doyle Brunson (1976-77), Stu Ungar (1980-81) and Johnny Chan (1987-88). Nobody has done it since Chan, and with fields in the thousands it is hard to imagine anyone doing it again. Moss and Ungar are the only three-time champions. Ungar's third title, in 1997, came sixteen years after his second, and it paid $1,000,000.

The most recent champion with a long record behind him was Michael Mizrachi in 2025. Earlier that summer he had won the $50,000 Poker Players Championship for a fourth time, and according to WSOP.com he became the first player to win both events in the same year. He was voted into the Poker Hall of Fame straight after the win.

Notable records

Four numbers come up whenever the Main Event is discussed, and all of them are in the table above:

• Largest field: 10,112 entries in 2024.
• Biggest first prize: $12,100,000, Daniel Weinman in 2023.
• Youngest champion: Joe Cada, 21, in 2009. Peter Eastgate had set the record at 22 only a year earlier, and Phil Hellmuth held it before him after winning at 24 in 1989.
• Most titles: three, shared by Johnny Moss and Stu Ungar.

PokerNews pointed out a neat pattern after the 2026 final: Americans won four in a row from 2015 to 2018, players from elsewhere took the next four from 2019 to 2022, and Americans have won the four since. Whether that tells you anything about the state of the game in either place is open to debate.

From the rail to the felt

The Main Event is a no-limit hold'em tournament, so every hand on this list was won with the same two-card game you can deal yourself right now. Sit down at the free hold'em table to play it without money on the line, read the strategy guides for the thinking behind a deep tournament run, or go back to the famous poker players page for the profiles and career numbers of Brunson, Chan, Ungar, Hellmuth and the modern high-roller crowd.