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Longtime poker pro Charlie Carrel hasn’t played the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas for nine straight years, and he recently revealed why: because he’s banned from entering the United States.
The British online poker crusher, in a recent YouTube video, told a story about why he can no longer legally visit the U.S. He last attended the WSOP in 2017 when he ran deep in the Main Event, finishing 88th out of 7,221 players for $72,514.
Carrel hasn’t been much of a tournament player anywhere for years. He has over $9.6 million in live tournament cashes recorded by The Hendon Mob, but only a few in the past two years. The online poker crusher and YouTuber, however, can’t even fly to Las Vegas next week to compete in the juicy cash games around town during the WSOP, thanks to some legal trouble he found himself in years ago.
Poker Pro Tells His Story
The first two of 100 gold bracelet events at the 2026 WSOP begin on May 26 in Paris and Horseshoe Las Vegas. Poker fans, for the ninth straight year (or eighth if you don’t count 2020), won’t see Carrel in attendance. As he explained in the YouTube video, he can’t even visit the U.S. over a 2017 arrest.
“I got arrested in America, and I got banned from America,” Carrel said before cracking a joke about the current administration’s immigration policy. “I’m currently not allowed in the United States of America, unless I’m sure if I came in the South border. Oh, no, no, Trump’s in, can’t even do that. I’m done for, I’m screwed.”
Carrel then said he used to take drugs “all the time” and attributed his early success in poker to “the era of which I was experimenting with in said narcotics.” The drug use information was an intro to a story about his ban, which happened following a flight to Las Vegas just after Donald Trump took office for the first time in 2017.
“A lot of the border security had kind of tightened up on foreigners, and to this day, I’m still outraged, because he didn’t mean me, he didn’t mean English foreigners,” Carrel said. “But they had to be non-discriminatory.”
Carrel claims that due to his immigration status, a customs agent began searching his bags, which he didn’t think would be a problem. But the agent found three pink pills in a jar. The poker pro says he wasn’t sure if he’d done anything illegal, but he also didn’t know “if there were more drugs than that” in his suitcase.
Carrel was sent to a Clark County, Nevada jail where he learned all about the U.S. jail system. He only spent that one night behind bars, but he still cannot enter the country over eight years later.