Alex Foxen has become the ninth player in history to pass $60 million in career live tournament earnings, joining a group that did not exist in any form two decades ago. The all-time money list now has nine names above a threshold that, adjusted for the era, would have seemed like a rounding error in the entire game's annual prize pool when most of these players started.
The milestone arrived during a 2026 that has been extraordinarily productive for Foxen, who also collected his fourth career WSOP bracelet by winning the $10,000 super turbo bounty event for $594,246.
The Nine-Figure Trajectory of a Six-Figure Game
It is worth pausing on how quickly this happened.
Live tournament poker's all-time money list is not a measure of profit. It is a measure of gross cashes — the total of every payout a player has collected, with no deduction for buy-ins, staking arrangements or expenses. That distinction matters enormously and gets lost constantly, so it is worth stating plainly at the top: a player with $60 million in recorded cashes has not made $60 million.
What the list does measure, accurately, is participation at the very top of the game across a period when the top of the game got much, much bigger. The rise of super high roller events — $100,000, $250,000 and larger buy-ins, running as regular fixtures on multiple continents — restructured the leaderboard in less than fifteen years. A player who plays that circuit and wins at a modest clip will accumulate recorded cashes at a rate that no amount of success in a $10,000 environment could match.
That is the central fact behind the $60 million club. Its members are not necessarily the nine most profitable tournament players who have ever lived. They are the nine who have combined a genuine elite-level edge with sustained access to the largest buy-ins on the calendar — and access, in this context, means either a very large personal bankroll or a very good staking network.
Why Bryn Kenney Sits Where He Does
The list is headed by Bryn Kenney, who this year surpassed $90 million in career tournament cashes — a figure so far clear of the historical field that it functions as its own category.
Kenney's position is the purest illustration of the super high roller effect. A relatively small number of enormous results, concentrated in the highest buy-in events in the world, produce a career total that no volume-based approach could approach. It is also, by the same token, the clearest illustration of why the money list should be read carefully: the buy-ins that generate those cashes are themselves seven-figure annual expenditures.
Foxen's 2026
Alex Foxen's year is a useful case study in what a modern elite tournament season looks like, because it is not just a money-list story.
The $60 million milestone came alongside his fourth WSOP bracelet, won in the $10,000 super turbo bounty event for $594,246. Foxen has also been a fixture at the top of the Global Poker Index rankings, and the combination — ranking dominance, bracelet success and money-list accumulation in the same calendar year — is unusual even among the game's best.
The bracelet is the piece worth dwelling on. Four WSOP bracelets is a substantial career achievement on its own, and it speaks to something the money list cannot capture: results across formats and structures rather than concentration in a single high-value environment. A super turbo bounty event is a fundamentally different game from a $250,000 super high roller, and winning both requires genuinely different skill sets.
The Foxen Household Had a Year
Kristen Foxen's 2026 was, by several measures, the more historically significant of the two.
She won the $25,000 No-Limit Hold'em High Roller at the World Series, extending her women's record to six bracelets — three more than any other woman in the game's history — and five open bracelets. The "open" qualifier matters: these are events with no field restriction, won against the full population of entrants, which is the metric that settles the argument about what her record actually represents.
She and Alex also became the first spouses to both win live open bracelets in the same year. That is the kind of record that is unlikely to be broken often, for straightforwardly demographic reasons.
For anyone tracking the year's full set of results, our WSOP 2026 results page collects the complete bracelet ledger.
Negreanu's Quarter-Century Mark
The other milestone worth recording from 2026 is Daniel Negreanu becoming the first player to reach $25,000,000 in WSOP winnings.
That is a different kind of record from the all-time money list, and arguably a more meaningful one. WSOP earnings accumulate only during a fixed annual window, in a single tournament series, across a schedule that anyone can enter. It is closer to a measure of sustained excellence in a controlled environment than the money list is — no super high roller circuit inflating the denominator, no access question, just decades of results at the same series.
Negreanu reaching $25 million there before anyone else is a longevity record as much as a skill record. It requires having been very good for a very long time, in an era when the standard of play at the WSOP rose from amateur-heavy to professionally saturated. Very few careers survive that transition intact.
What the Money List Is Good For — And What It Isn't
Because these figures circulate constantly and get misread constantly, it is worth being explicit about how to use them.
What it is good for: identifying who has been operating at the top of the game, at scale, over time. If a name appears near the top of the list, that player has repeatedly reached final tables in the largest events in the world. That is not nothing. It is a meaningful signal of ability.
What it is not good for: ranking profitability, comparing eras, or evaluating a player's actual financial position. A recorded cash tells you nothing about how much of that cash the player kept. Staking arrangements at the high-roller level frequently involve selling significant percentages of action, which means the headline figure and the player's take can diverge dramatically. Nor does the list deduct the buy-ins that produced those cashes — and in super high roller poker, the buy-ins are the dominant line item.
The era problem. Prize pools have grown enormously. Comparing a player who competed primarily in the 1990s and 2000s with one who has played the 2020s super high roller circuit is not a like-for-like exercise. The list systematically favours the recent.
What This Means for Players
Nine players above $60 million is a headline. The useful takeaway for everyone else is not the number — it is the structure underneath it.
Gross cashes are a vanity metric; track your own net. The single most valuable habit an aspiring tournament player can build is honest, complete record-keeping that includes every buy-in, every re-entry, every satellite, and travel costs. The money list is a leaderboard of receipts, not results. Your own accounts should not be.
Access is a real barrier, and pretending otherwise is expensive. The players on this list are on it partly because they can afford to be in the events that produce those numbers. Trying to replicate the trajectory without the bankroll behind it is the most common route to leaving the game entirely. Our bankroll management guide sets out realistic buy-in requirements for each format, and they are more conservative than most players want them to be for good reason.
Understand what high-stakes poker actually is before you aim at it. The high stakes environment is a small, closed population of elite regulars with enormous variance and thin edges. It is a legitimate career for a very small number of people and a very efficient way to lose money for everyone else.
Study the format, not the leaderboard. Foxen's bracelet came in a super turbo bounty — a structure with its own distinct demands. Adaptability across formats is what separates the durable careers from the flash-in-the-pan ones, and it is a learnable skill. Start with the fundamentals in our poker strategy section and build outward.
Learn ICM properly. Every result on the all-time money list was shaped by decisions made near pay jumps. The Independent Chip Model is the single highest-leverage concept in tournament poker, and most players who think they understand it are applying a simplified version that costs them money at exactly the moments it matters most.
Nine names above $60 million, one above $90 million, and a first-ever $25 million at the World Series. The numbers keep climbing because the game keeps getting bigger — but for the overwhelming majority of the tournament population, the lesson of the money list is about how records are made, not about how to chase them.