World Series of Poker Main Event Champ Ryan Riess Rolls Perfect Game for $5,000

Ryan Riess may be a killer on the felt, but the 2013 World Series of Poker Main Event champion showed he can perform under pressure at South Pointe Casino in Las Vegas Monday night in another sport.

No, Riess didn’t join the regulars in one of its daily poker tournaments. That’s not what he, Jesse Lonis and Dan Sepiol do on Monday nights in Las Vegas. It’s their bowling league night.

“All right, here’s the scoop,” said Lonis in a video he posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter. “If Ryan Riess bowls a 300, I lose $5,000..

According to the Detroit News, the poker players joined a bowling league this year, and when they started, Riess and Lonis made a small (for them) side bet: The first man to bowl a perfect game of 300 would win $5,000.

That’s small potatoes to both Riess, who won $8 million at the WSOP in 2013, and Lonis, who currently sits with $27.4 million in tourney cashes, according to the Hendon Mob.

Riess, who brought a 198 average into the Monday’s match, said the first nine strikes were easy. It wasn’t until Lonis and friends pulled out their cell phones to start recording the 35-year-old WSOP champ’s last three throws.

“I got nervous on my second ball in the 10th,” Riess told The Detroit News. “I was pretty fine before that.”

With one ball to go, Lonis was begging for the Riess to leave one pin standing. “I’m in a bad spot here. Oh my God. It’s like Ryan Riess is wearing a Detroit Lions jersey right now,” Lonis said, referring to the jersey he wore when he won the Main Event.

And as the last of the 10 pins fell, Riess pumped his fist while the other bowling at South Pointe cheered.

The $5,000 is $2,000 less than what Riess won for finishing eighth in a $3,300 event at the WSOP Circuit in Las Vegas in January. He also won $28,000 in the $3,500 World Poker Tour Lucky Hearts Poker Open that month.

Lonis had a career-defining 2025 where he found his way to the top of nearly every Player of the Year list. He already has five cashes in 2026, and started the year with a $125,000 cash for a third-place finish in a $10,100 event on the PokerGO Tour.

Bowling a 300 game is certainly a rare event, though it happens a few times a day across the country. Better lanes, equipment, and an understanding of the game turned something that only happened about 500 times a year in the 1960s, to around 11,500 a year now.

Still, the odds are extremely low. We”ll let the experts at tenpindoctors.com explain: “According to the United States Bowling Congress (USBC), more than 50 million sanctioned games are bowled annually in the United States alone. Yet, despite the frequency of bowling, the probability of a bowler achieving a 300 in any given game is incredibly low. The odds of rolling a 300 in a sanctioned league are roughly 1 in 11,500.”

The odds are probably higher for Riess, whose 198 average tells us the boy could roll. And now he gets to add a 300 ring commemorating his first 300 game. Congrats Ryan.

Click here to watch the video of Riess knocking them down.