Poker fans have grown accustomed to seeing high-stakes pros walk away with millions of dollars from events with five- and six-figures buy-ins. High rollers have become a big part of the poker tournament series worldwide.
Some players may wonder how they can put so much at risk. What’s it like playing in these poker tournaments, and what kind of players participate?
Keep reading to learn more about the world of high rollers, including a behind-the-scenes peek at this unique part of the poker landscape.
Negreanu on High Rollers
Buy-ins with $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 or more have become more common over the last decade. Poker pro Daniel Negreanu knows a bit about these nosebleed stakes and won the $300,000 Super High Roller Bowl in Las Vegas in 2022 for $3.3 million.
While it once took massive fields to produce a payout like that, huge stakes can create enormous prize pools. Negreanu's win included a field of just 24 players.
The seven-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner scooped another high roller title in 2024, taking down the $50,000 Poker Players Championship at the WSOP for $1.2 million. Negreanu recently noted on Twitter how prevalent these events have become and the massive bankroll needed to play.
“In 1999, if you travelled the world playing the highest stakes tournaments, you couldn’t spend more than $250,000,” he tweeted. “In 2013, that number rose to roughly $1.2 million. In 2025, that number is roughly $12 million. You need to cash for $12 million+ to turn a profit if you play all the Triton, WSOP, and other high rollers.”
“Not everyone will hit every stop, but among the high roller regs that play most of them, I think spending $10 million is reasonable considering every Triton stop will run you about $2 million in buy-ins,” he noted.
In 1999 if you traveled the world playing the highest stakes tournaments, you couldn’t spend more than $250,000.
— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) April 19, 2025
In 2013 that number rose to roughly $1.2 million.
In 2025, that number is roughly $12 million.
You need to cash for $12 million+ to turn a profit if you play all…
Only three players cashed for $12 million or more last year. That group includes some of the best poker players of all time: Adrian Mateos ($13.1 million), Patrik Antonius ($12.5 million), and Alejandro Lococo ($12.3 million).
Only three of them topped $10 million: Alex Foxen, Daniel Dvoress, and Jonathan Tamayo, who won the WSOP $10,000 Main Event.
Swapping & Backing
That insight shows that most high-stakes pros probably aren’t risking a significant chunk of their bankrolls. Instead, using backers and swapping percentages is a major part of participation at this level, which is a rich player's poker cheat sheet!
“Most every pro who is playing this kind of high roller schedule is selling action and/or swapping. So, if you see a pro who played them all cash for $7 million in a year, likely losing $3-5 million, they didn’t actually lose that much, if anything at all,” Negreanu said.
In 2018, 888poker pro Dominik Nitsche confirmed this sentiment. He offered his insight into playing these types of poker games and said a group of “investors” back many players in high rollers.
“It's no secret that there is a big financial group behind most of the high roller players,” he told PokerNews. “It's a group that buys up all the action everyone wants to sell, off some of the best players in the field. There's not much else going on.
A player just goes and sells to one person, and that person says, 'You're good. I'll pay you a markup, and then your action is sold, and you go play.’”
Nitsche noted that most staked players in high roller events have only 30-40% of their action, with that going as low as 20% and as high as 50%.
Nitsche says these backers are often former high-stakes pros who have done well, and players settle after events. A backer can reap big dividends if one of his players makes a deep run and grabs a seven-figure score.
Rising WINS Totals
In recent years, high-stakes pros have seen their win totals balloon from high roller results. For example, the top five players on Hendon Mob’s all-time money list all have winnings of more than $60 million.
- Bryn Kenney sits atop that list with $75.8 million with 12 scores of $1 million or more. That total also includes a win of $20.6 million after finishing runner-up in the Triton Million for Charity in 2019. That event featured 54 players each ponying up a £1 million buy-in for a prize pool of more than $65 million.
Kenney’s results show that those $1 million-plus scores account for about $49 million, approximately 53% of his live tournament winnings. He also has several other major scores of $800,000 and $900,000.
Other players at the top of the money list have similar results and show how crucial these significant buy-in results are to the race for the player with the most career winnings.
High-Roller Money Mirage
Despite those numbers, some insight from players like Negreanu and Nitsche shows these high-roller players are winning a much smaller percentage of these amounts.
Finding backers allows players to reduce their own poker variance, which seems to skew real take-home “winnings”.
A player winning $1 million with 30% of his own action still takes home $300,000. But this is far from the seven figures reported.
“What you envision at the highest stakes is mostly a mirage,” Negreanu noted. “No one playing these rates to have an ROI (return on investment) over $5 million in any given year. Profitable years like that will happen, but they are anomalies rather than the norm.”
Seth Davies recently spoke with Card Player about his backing, which includes swapping percentages with the players and being part of a staking group. He offered some insight on how his high roller action works and believes still having a nice percentage of his action is essential:
“I think it's just the right way to do it because one, not having skin in the game is not good for anybody,” he said. “It's not good for yourself or the backer. And two, it just makes my upside bigger. I'm really comfortable with it. It sucks when you have trips like Monaco, where I've lost like 10% of my net worth just getting wrecked.
“Obviously, it'd be nice to just have a pure makeup deal where I don't risk anything, but I don't really want that either because even though I would always give my biggest effort, your incentives are not perfectly aligned with your backers. It just makes you play better, too.”
The last few months have been insane. To win go on a run like this and win two different marquee super high rollers has been one hell of a career highlight. Truly something I could have only imagined when I was a new pro grinding $10 SNG's for a living. My high stakes career… pic.twitter.com/6Qce7l1a29
— Seth Davies (@Sdavies22) October 28, 2024
High Roller versus Mid and Low Stakes
Some players have noted that high rollers feature millions of dollars on the line, but the game is still the same. High rollers treat the game like a job, putting in plenty of work studying, breaking down hands, and using solvers.
These players still have significant sums at risk. Negreanu has some advice for players looking to make a living in the game without risking massive sums.
“If you want to make a good living as a tournament player, your best bet is to focus on low to mid-stakes buy-in tourneys,” he says.
“The pros who play their own money in the mid and low stakes tourneys with slower structures and weaker players have a much higher ROI and make more money than the group who plays the turbo high rollers.”
