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Image courstesy of PokerGO Tour
Three years ago, Daniel Weinman from Atlanta, Georgia, won the 2023 World Series of Poker Main Event. Upon doing so, he retired as a professional in the game and started a new business.
We caught up with the biggest-ever winner of the World Championship to find out how his new life is treating him and whether he’ll come back to the felt in the future.
Those Pocket Jacks
If Daniel Weinman is asked about one poker hand, it is the one he won with pocket jacks on his way to the final table back in 2023. All-in with ‘the fishhooks’, Daniel was at risk of elimination when he saw his opponents’ cards with three players committing their chips. Jose Aguilera held pocket queens with the biggest stack, and Joshua Payne had pocket kings. Heading to the turn after a bare flop, Daniel was just a 5% shot to win the hand.
Amazingly, one of those jacks popped up on the turn.
At the time, in the moment, you’d don’t realize how much money that’s worth, says Daniel today. I wasn’t thinking about it. Your emotions go from ‘I’m 90% to be out of this tournament’ to suddenly ‘I’m going to the final table as one of the chip leaders.
In an already emotionally charged spot in the biggest poker tournament on earth, Daniel says, “there’s nothing else like it,” and he knows that it is a hand he’ll always be connected to.
Any time I say anything about luck on social media, someone reposts the hand saying, ‘Have you seen the runouts you get?’ It’s not that interesting a hand – I just happened to get super lucky! My Dad plays a little bit of poker, and he always said to me, ‘There are three ways to play jacks, and they’re all wrong.’ I guess I finally proved him wrong.
The Biggest Top Prize Ever
All the talk before the Main Event reached the final table that year was about the size of the top prize. At $12.1 million, it topped the $12m won by Jamie Gold in 2006 and remains the biggest ever winner’s prize in the World Championship.
I was definitely fortunate to get a kind of lopsided-to-heavy payout, says Daniel now. I remember that year when the payouts came out, Josh Arieh put out a tweet like: ‘One person is going to be really happy.’ I just happened to be that person. The payouts since then are going back; the operators have to spread the money around a bit more, or it all comes out of the ecosystem too fast.
To a certain extent, I suggest, that’s exactly what happened with Daniel, who has left the world of professional poker behind. I wonder whether becoming world champion gave him the sense that he had ‘completed’ poker.
I think so, he admits. When I started playing, it was always the pinnacle. When I was 16 years old, I thought it would be a great achievement to play in the World Series of Poker.
Five years later, I turned 21 and played in my first Main Event. You will get one or two chances to run deep and convert in your time, so to do so at the first attempt was the pinnacle.
While Daniel admits that 2023 was his crowning achievement, he was famously back at his office desk a week after winning and tells me that win or lose, he was always going to leave poker around that time.
I felt like my edge was going down in the games, and it was fruitless to keep at it. Even though I had been very successful, I was aware of how much luck I’d had in my career.
An All-American Finale
When the final three players were left in the tournament, Daniel was joined by his compatriots Steven Jones and Adam Walton. After four non-American winners in a row, it was all change.
All three of us were American professionals who didn’t come from a GTO background where you wouldn’t have a personality at the table. Heads-up, we were playing heads-up for $16m, but we were having fun, cracking jokes, and it was good fun.
Talk to anyone who knows me, and they’ll say I don’t have this vibrant personality, but it does come out at the poker table – it’s one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to poker.
The fact that the final trio hailed from the United States was a source of real pride for Daniel, and he looks back at that achievement now as quite unique in recent history.
The game had taken a shift to the Europeans, who were playing a lot of online poker and advancing faster than us. The Main Event doesn’t reward the best player in the world; it rewards the luckiest player of the 2,000 best players in the world. There are 10,000 people who play the tournament, and probably 2,000 have a chance to win.
Being Part of Team Lucky
At his rail, Daniel was backed up by ‘Team Lucky’ comprising himself, Shaun Deeb, Josh Arieh, and Matt Glantz. Between them, the foursome, who have bonded over many different games in their lives, including golf and Fortnite, provide each other with incredible support.
It’s unbelievable to have people supporting you in whatever form that takes. There were people doing some work on chip-stacks and table draws every night, which is taking a load off your plate. I remember Chance Kornuth did some video work on live tells.
Anything you can get from an edge perspective in that scenario is awesome, but also having people in your corner keeping your head straight. I remember specifically after the jacks’ hand, I was on cloud nine, and my emotions were running over. It’s easy to go into autopilot or have winner’s tilt after that. Josh was on the rail and was like: ‘Take one hand off… then get back to work.’
Daniel always swapped with Shaun Deeb in poker tournaments, so the eight-time WSOP bracelet winner had 10% of Daniel in the Main Event. Josh Arieh, however, didn’t have anything on the line.
We had no swap in this tournament, so having one of my best friends there, who had zero financial interest, was just fantastic. Josh was an idol of mine growing up, being from the same city. He final tabled in 2004 when I was just getting into poker.
We played poker for the first time, and we played golf the next day. We both enjoyed golf, and neither of us was trying to earn off of the other one; it was something that bonded us.
During the pocket jacks hand, there’s a terrific photo of the jack coming on the turn and Josh Arieh jumping for joy in the background. Recently, Daniel had the chance to support his friend from afar while Josh played in the WSOP Main Event. Down to 50 players, the Atlanta man’s pocket aces were cracked by pocket queens when a queen landed on the river.
I was watching, and I showed that clip of him losing with aces to my wife. I said, ‘This is everything that’s wrong with poker right now.’ It’s a huge spot with 50 people left, and the queen comes on the river. Josh is such a professional; he doesn’t react, but the young kid who won the pot: no reaction.
The other seven people at the table: ho hum, no reaction. Even the reporter just writes the hand down and is onto the next. I get it, it’s important, it’s a job now, but you’re allowed to react when you hit a two-outer for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Leaving Poker Behind
When Daniel Weinman won poker, it could be argued that he was at the top of his game. Deeply entrenched in the game, however, he was aware that he wanted to move on. Since winning the Main Event three years ago, Daniel has bought what he calls a poker restaurant.
Working on the RFID technology that displays poker cards to viewers on screen before his Main Event win, he focused full-time on the business after his success in Las Vegas.
The central concept of Daniel’s business is the RFID poker table, as used by the World Series of Poker, where a tiny chip inside the poker card translates information to a central operating system. Mixing socializing with that concept brought social gaming and a restaurant experience to fruition in Alpharetta, Georgia, in his poker restaurant Showdown.
Even when I won the Main Event, I was on my way out of poker. Three years later, we’ve transformed the business , we have two sides to the business, and I’m running the social side of things, which is stressful and fun and a different challenge to the one poker ever brought.
Daniel tells me how he and his team realized early on that if they were just catering to poker players, the number of people they’d reach was tiny compared to if they opened up their offering. Removing the gambling aspect of the business, they suddenly had ten times as many customers.
He’s adapted it to a more expansive gaming system, which, placed within a thriving restaurant, gives players of many card games a way to play and socialize that they’ve never had before.
Most of the purpose of RFID tables is to stream that action to the internet, but outside of a very small percentage of poker enthusiasts, no one really wants to watch Hustler live stream a poker game, says Daniel. So how did we scale this technology for people who are not super hardcore poker players? We developed some extra games.
We basically opened up this poker restaurant in Atlanta, where you have a dealer. You get the WSOP experience, but you’re playing social card games with your friends. I still get the poker fix because we have between 50 and 100 people who come in to play our nightly tournament, but then you also have 100 people a week who rent a table to play super technologically advanced Uno with their friends!
Bringing More Women to the Table
Poker is, historically at least, a game played much more by men, with up to 95% of a tournament field being male. Daniel wanted to change that, but only offering poker brought some direct feedback via some group market research.
Some groups of women, who thought poker was a man’s game, were like ‘What can you build for us?’ and now 40% of our customers are women, so it’s been transformative. Even for our nightly poker tournament, we’re up to 40% female players, and the social games are 50/50.
Showdown doesn’t offer gambling, mostly because the jurisdiction they are in makes that illegal, but also because Daniel realized pretty quickly that the hardcore male gambler wasn’t necessarily his ideal demographic.
Guys who gamble are just going to stay at home and play in their basements, he says. We get a pretty good mix of people who want to play social games or other card games. You walk through the WSOP or any other big tournament series these days, and it doesn’t look like anybody’s having fun.
There’s a small subset of recreational players who are there to have fun, but as the game has evolved. It’s become ‘How perfect can we play?,’ or ‘How stoic can everybody be?’ Poker has lost a lot of what made me fall in love with the game. That’s one of our big pillars; how do we make people have fun while they’re playing cards again?
Can the Average Pro Survive in the GTO Era?
The money in poker has increased so much that Daniel believes that his leaving the game coincided with a period where the game not only got serious but became less beatable. We don’t even discuss the Trump bill that altered the gambling tax at the top of the year, but Daniel believes turning pro is harder than ever.
As the edges have gotten smaller and smaller, the bottom 90% that lose money have either moved on to something else, or they’ve improved. The money that the top 5% or 10% are getting hold of is a fraction of what it used to be. I was 20 years in, and making $100,000- $200,000 a year in poker – not that anything is guaranteed – doesn’t go as far as it used to.
As Daniel says, the elite level of players at the top have had to get more serious. In his opinion, it’s a vicious cycle.
There’s less money in the pool, so the top players have to get better and unfortunately, having fun with poker and being an elite poker player don’t go hand in hand – it’s almost the complete opposite.
Losing the Will to Gamble
Playing poker for so many years, Daniel would frequently bet six-figure sums on the action at the table… and away from it. Now with a 10-month-old daughter, Daniel can see a chasm between the type of life he had before and the one he enjoys now.
When I was in my twenties and single, traveling the world, I had two or three times where I ran up a seven-figure bankroll and completely busted it, playing games [that were] too big or playing a bunch of Open Face Chinese Poker against the best players in the world. The downside was very little to me. It was like ‘I’ll go broke, I’ll restart, there’s no issue’.
Now, there are two other people counting on me. I can’t do that anymore. It’s taken away my desire to gamble almost entirely. I’ve played very little in the last two years. Mentally, I don’t know how I would handle losing a loss that would be relatively peanuts compared to what I used to gamble with every single day.
Nowadays, Daniel says that his time is largely spent working with many young computer engineers, who ‘hang on my every word’ about tales from Daniel’s supposedly reckless poker past.
I’ll tell them a story from my old poker life, where I flew to Florida, lost $300,000 to Jason Mercier, then went and stayed at his house and threw up in his bathroom. Now, that same thing would probably happen but for very different reasons!
Poker is full of huge characters, but also some of the most philanthropic people in the world by industry. Many of Daniel’s lifelong friends are or were poker professionals, and he says that the unique game polarizes the players – and people – it produces.
I think poker gets a lot of the best people in the world, and a lot of the worst, Daniel says. Every other industry is going to have a lot of middle-of-the-road people because of where they are, but poker selects for some of the smartest and best people that can make it in that preferred industry, but you’re also going to have the opposite side when there’s this much money involved and the possibility for grifting.
The security concerns many have about online poker are widespread and getting larger. Daniel tells me that he doesn’t see a future where online poker does a lot at all. He also says he finds this hard to accept.
I came up in online poker. I played PokerStars almost exclusively, I was Supernova Elite, and I thought that was going to be my entire career, just playing online poker. I can’t imagine how much the sites need to pay now in order to protect against players getting cheated.
I could write a bot in a day that could beat some low-stakes poker games. Not that I’m willing to do that, but there are people who are willing to do that. I still have friends that play online religiously and make a pretty good living doing it, but I think the window [to do that] is getting smaller and smaller.
Will Daniel Return to Las Vegas?
With the next Main Event just over a month away, the temptation for Daniel to come back is real. He is, after all, officially the most successful defending champion in terms of players he outlasted in 2024 after winning it a year earlier. In 2025, he was a no-show for the best of reasons.
I didn’t play last year because my daughter was born June 20th, and we made the decision not to go out at all. I won in 2023, I played again in 2024, we’ve talked about it, and we’ll probably go out again this year.
But I used to hang on the WSOP every February to see the schedule being released to plan my whole next six months around it. Now, it’s like ‘we’ll see what’s coming up around the summer and if we’re not doing anything, the WSOP will be there.
Daniel tells me that he and his wife are now deep into backgammon, and with the World Backgammon Championships around the same time, it might be more fun for him to go there. Plus, he met Zdenek ‘ZZ’ Zizka, the Czech backgammon grandmaster who was Shaun Deeb’s conqueror in a WSOP bracelet event last summer while they were both in The Bahamas at the WSOP Super Main Event.
When I met my wife a few years ago, she was at a golf club, and they usually have poker nights once or twice a week. At this club, backgammon was the game, and a lot of money was changing hands. I was like, ‘Let’s pick this back up.’
ZZ is one of the best backgammon players in the world. He’s fantastic. We met in The Bahamas at the only tournament I played in 2025, and we had a good time and played some backgammon. It’s fun sharing success stories from opposite worlds.
Daniel believes that while poker can bring another side to anyone’s personality to the felt in backgammon, that theory works in reverse.
I’m a pretty shy, introverted person in real life, but at the poker table I’m outgoing, playing a ton of hands and having a good time. For some reason, the way you play backgammon mirrors how you are in life. My Dad will never leave a blot on the board; he’ll have the ugliest looking board of all-time, but he’s perfectly safe.
Daniel looks back at the WSOP Main Event of 2023 with huge pride, but with an innate sense of completion. No player in poker history has ever won a bigger top prize, and it may well be years before that is the case. If he does show up in Las Vegas this year, it’s as someone looking to have fun.
I don’t feel like I have that much of an edge in poker anymore, so it would be more of a vacation with a poker tournament at the end rather than a great money-making opportunity.
With that, and one of his trademark mile-wide smiles, the 2023 world champion is off to play golf, naturally, before he heads to the tables at Showdown. You can make one bet on the action in the Atlanta poker restaurant; when someone gets dealt pocket jacks, the owner is called over to give them that bit of luck they might need to survive.
The time it worked for him will – like his Main Event victory for $12.1 million – never be forgotten.