The strongest chess-to-poker crossover in the game is Dan Smith, who gave up a chess scholarship at 18 and now sits eighth on the all-time money list with $61.4 million. Behind him: a Main Event champion, a Twitch star and the world’s best chess player.

The timing is not accidental. Chess.com’s free poker site Gambit passed 75,000 members after its first streamed Gambit Cup, with Alexandra Botez on commentary, and a new wave of chess players is about to find out how much of their game travels.

How the list works: every player held a recognised chess title or championship before their first poker result, and every poker figure below comes from The Hendon Mob and WSOP.com. Live tournament earnings only; streamed cash games and online results are mentioned where they matter but never counted.

Chess Players Who Play Poker: The Full Ranking

Here are the eleven chess players who play poker, ranked by poker achievement first and chess pedigree second. A world champion with two cashes sits below a park hustler with a bracelet, and that is the point of the list.

The Pros Who Made It Their Career

Five players on this list left chess for poker as a job, and all five carry tracked results in six or seven figures. Their chess ceilings ran from park hustler to European champion; their poker floors all sit above any grandmaster’s.

1. Dan Smith

Dan Smith played chess seriously for eight or nine years, earned a scholarship to the University of Maryland, and went home to New Jersey after his first year when the game stopped being fun. He was 18, already winning online, and never went back.

The poker record since is second to nobody who ever pushed a pawn. The Hendon Mob tracks $61,357,161 across 262 cashes, eighth on the all-time money list, with a best of $8,765,628 for third in the 2019 Triton Million in London.

The bracelet came in 2022 in the $25,000 Heads-Up Championship, joining a 2013 WPT title and a reputation for bluntness. Smith’s run-in with Jason Koon at the table is still quoted.

“I played chess quite seriously for maybe eight or nine years.” – Dan Smith

2. Dan Harrington

Dan Harrington was the 1971 Massachusetts Chess Champion before he was a bankruptcy lawyer, a World Cup of Backgammon winner or a poker player. He has said chess only pays if you are among the top five or six in the world, so he moved on.

The move paid. He won the 1995 WSOP Main Event for $1,000,000 a week after his first bracelet, then reached the Main Event final table again in 2003 and 2004, taking fourth in 2004 for $1,500,000.

Tracked earnings stand at $6,653,820 from 56 cashes, and the Harrington on Hold’em books taught a generation to count their M. The books, the Poker Hall of Fame induction and Harrington’s full career and net worth are covered in his profile.

3. Ylon Schwartz

Ylon Schwartz found chess among the hustlers of Washington Square Park as a teenager, won two dollars in his first game, and was soon taking $100 a day off passers-by. He reached a peak USCF rating of 2408 and the FIDE Master title.

A friend took him to a New York poker club in the mid-1990s, and in 2008 he sat at the first November Nine, finishing fourth in the WSOP Main Event for $3,794,974. The bracelet arrived in 2012 in the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E., where he beat David Chiu heads-up for $267,081.

He never stopped grinding. His tracked record runs to $5,180,787 across 173 cashes, and WSOP.com credits him with 76 cashes and 14 final tables at the series alone.

4. Jennifer Shahade

Jennifer Shahade won the US Women’s Championship in 2002 and 2004, holds the Woman Grandmaster title, and was the first woman to win the US Junior Open. She has been PokerStars’ MindSports ambassador since 2014.

Her poker breakthrough waited until November 2025, when she finished third in the $5,300 NAPT Las Vegas Main Event for $291,800, her largest cash by a distance. Three months earlier she had won the PokerStars Women’s Summer Festival Main Event in London.

Her 78 cashes add up to $825,127. Between the two games she has written several books and hosts The Grid, a podcast built around one starting hand per episode.

5. Almira Skripchenko

Almira Skripchenko was the 2001 European Women’s Champion, an International Master and a seven-time French women’s champion with a peak rating of 2501. She picked up poker in Paris in the 2000s and turned it into a second career.

Her best poker year was 2009, when she reached the final table of a $2,000 WSOP event in Las Vegas and finished seventh for $78,664. A year later she took third in the France Poker Tour Grand Final for $84,827, still her largest cash.

She has kept playing. Her 13 tracked cashes total $352,417, and the most recent came in June 2026.

The Mayfair Club Pipeline

Harrington did not arrive at poker alone. He came through New York’s chess and backgammon rooms into the Mayfair Club in the mid-1980s, the game that also produced Erik Seidel, where he found the sixth player on this list at the same tables.

6. Howard Lederer

Howard Lederer was a USCF expert who played chess in the front room of New York’s Bar Point Club and heads-up poker in the back, according to International Master Mark Ginsburg, who did both with him. The club folded in the mid-1980s and Lederer followed the poker.

He won WSOP bracelets in 2000 and 2001, took WPT titles in 2002 and 2003, and won the A$100,000 Aussie Millions event in 2008 for A$1,250,000.

His 107 cashes total $6,582,745, the last in January 2011. Full Tilt’s collapse ended his playing career, but the chess-club route he took into poker is the oldest one on this list.

A decade later Schwartz walked the same route from Washington Square Park to a Manhattan card club. Three of the six professionals on this list came out of one city’s chess scene, and none of them planned it.

Grandmasters at the Poker Table

Three of the strongest chess players alive have played serious poker, and the results measure how far the games are apart. Calculation has taken a grandmaster to a WSOP Online final table and a Main Event Day 3; it has not yet produced a major title.

7. Alexander Grischuk

Alexander Grischuk is a three-time World Blitz Champion, the 2009 Russian champion and a former world number three with a peak rating of 2810. He is also the grandmaster who has taken poker most seriously.

He played the WSOP Main Event in 2009 and 2010, reaching Day 3 the second time, and cashed for $25,678 at EPT Barcelona in 2008. His best run came in the 2020 WSOP Online on GGPoker: sixth in a $1,050 bounty event for $30,898, and around $46,000 across the series.

The Hendon Mob spells him Grishchuk and lists $41,096 in live earnings across 14 cashes. Magnus Carlsen traces his own interest to Monte Carlo in 2007, when he watched Grischuk play the EPT there.

8. Magnus Carlsen

Magnus Carlsen held the world championship from 2013 to 2023, has been the world number one for well over a decade, and has two tracked poker cashes worth $22,207 combined. Both came from big fields rather than celebrity tables.

He finished 25th in the Norwegian Championship Main Event in Dublin in April 2022, then went 63rd of 1,098 entries in the €5,300 EPT Monte Carlo Main Event in 2023 for €15,000. A Hustler Casino Live session the same spring showed a player happy to bluff with seven-deuce.

He has said he has no ambitions in poker, and the schedule agrees: chess fills his year. He sits among the celebrities who take poker seriously because the results, not the name, put him there.

9. Hikaru Nakamura

Hikaru Nakamura became a grandmaster at 15 years and 79 days in 2003, the youngest American to that point, and has won five US Championships. Around two million Twitch followers watch him under the GMHikaru handle.

His poker is recreational and mostly off the databases. He wrote in 2011 that he had played plenty of heads-up pot-limit Omaha over five years, then flew to Las Vegas for cash games and the WSOP Main Event, bagging 53,200 chips from a 30,000 start on Day 1.

No tracked cash followed, and his content since has stayed on chess. He is the one player here whose poker record lives mainly in his own blog.

Set peak chess rating against tracked poker earnings for the eight players with a published rating and the two run almost in opposite directions.

The Streaming Generation

The newest crossovers did not leave chess for poker. They brought their audience with them, and their poker careers are measured in stream viewers as much as in cashes.

10. Alexandra Botez

Alexandra Botez is a Woman FIDE Master, a five-time Canadian girls’ champion and half of BotezLive, which carries 1.3 million Twitch followers. She started playing poker seriously in 2021 and made her first known live appearance at that year’s $25,000 WPT Heads-Up Championship.

Botez’s Hustler Casino Live breakout in 2022 remains her signature result, with streamed cash game profit estimated at around $500,000 against $150,873 in tracked tournament earnings. She signed with ClubWPT Gold in May 2025 after 14 months as a GGPoker ambassador.

Her first live tournament win came at the 2023 PCA in a $550 hyper turbo, and she was on commentary for the first streamed Gambit Cup on 31 August 2026.

11. Qiyu “Nemo” Zhou

Qiyu “Nemo” Zhou was the first Canadian woman to earn the Woman Grandmaster title, an under-14 girls’ world youth champion, and national champion in both Finland and Canada. Her peak rating of 2367 sits well above Botez’s 2092.

Zhou won her first live poker tournament in August 2023, topping a 70-entry field at the Enclave Celebrity Poker Invitational in the PokerGO Studio for $20,000. A 178th-place finish in the $5,300 WSOP Paradise Main Event that December added $13,900.

Eight cashes for $53,512 make up her record so far. Off the felt, her lesson swap with Fedor Holz showed how far apart the two games’ training cultures have drifted.

Why Chess Skills Transfer to Poker

Every player above learned to calculate before they learned to bet. What carries over is specific, and so is what does not.

Calculation and pattern recognition

A tournament chess player calculates forced lines several moves deep and evaluates the resulting position without touching a piece. Poker asks for the same discipline in a smaller tree: three streets, a handful of bet sizes, and an equity number at the end of each branch.

Pattern recognition is the bigger gift. Grandmasters recognise structures instantly, and a chess player at the poker table learns to read board textures and sizing tells the same way. Thinking in ranges rather than hands is usually the first habit that clicks.

Perfect information vs incomplete information: the gap chess players have to close

Chess is a game of perfect information: every piece is visible and the only unknown is the opponent’s plan. Poker hides two cards per player and adds variance on every street, so a 2800-rated grandmaster can lose to a recreational player for a month and learn nothing from the scoreline.

Carlsen and Nakamura both describe poker as a hobby, and the rating table above supports them. Grischuk got closer than the other two grandmasters by putting in volume. Smith and Schwartz closed the gap completely, and neither a title nor a rating did it for them.

GTO is poker’s engine era

Chess went through its engine era in the 2000s, when software overtook the best humans and turned opening preparation into memorisation. Poker is living through the same shift now.

Read how solvers reshaped poker strategy and it looks like a chess history written twenty years late: study the engine, memorise the tree, then deviate when the opponent gives you a reason. That is a chess player’s working day, transplanted.

How We Ranked the Chess Players Who Play Poker

Poker achievement decides the order: titles and Main Event depth first, then verified live earnings from The Hendon Mob and bracelet records from WSOP.com, then the size and quality of the fields beaten. Chess pedigree only separates players whose poker records are close.

Every player needed a recognised chess title or national championship before their first poker result, and every figure was re-checked against its source before publication.

Chess.com’s next streamed Gambit Cup is the likeliest source of a twelfth name for this list.

Until then, our latest poker news coverage carries every crossover cash as it happens.