In April 2026, Dylan Linde revealed that David Peters, a player with nearly $50 million in career earnings, had spent months avoiding a $50,000 staking debt. Peters apologized publicly and repaid $27,000. The rest is still outstanding.

Peters is not an outlier. A Japanese high-stakes regular vanished owing an alleged $15 million. A lawyer who argued 44 cases at the US Supreme Court is now serving six years for tax evasion and for hiding his poker debts from mortgage lenders, and an Australian pro was taken to court by his backers over AU$400,450, arguing that as a problem gambler he never had the capacity to agree to the deal.

Poker runs on handshake deals. Staking, backing, borrowing mid-session: almost none of it is written down, and almost none of it can be enforced when someone decides not to pay.

This is our ranking of the biggest poker debts and scams in the game’s history, with verified amounts and what happened to everyone involved. Every case is labeled Court Confirmed, Charged, In Litigation, Admitted, or Allegation Only, so you always know the difference between a conviction and a Twitter accusation, updated for 2026.

Every major poker debt scandal and staking scam since 2010 is ranked by amount below. The full breakdown of each case follows.

*Amounts marked with an asterisk are alleged by accusers and have never been independently verified.

These are the largest sums one poker player has been accused of taking from another and never giving back. Some ended in court. Most ended in nothing at all, because a handshake between two players at a table is rarely a contract a court will enforce.

Ryusuke Daifuku: The $15 Million Disappearance

Status: Allegation only. Nothing recovered.

Ryusuke Daifuku was a Japanese high-stakes regular who played on Hustler Casino Live during 2022, winning a recorded $684,000 across roughly 12 weeks. He was at the table for the infamous Adelstein and Robbi Jade Lew hand in September 2022. Then he vanished.

In spring 2023, Nik Airball named him on a live HCL stream, saying Daifuku owed him $160,000 personally and roughly $500,000 to players in the Los Angeles area. Another regular on the same broadcast said a friend was owed a six-figure sum and offered a bounty for information on his whereabouts.

Daifuku has never responded publicly to any of the accusations. No creditor has filed suit, which is unsurprising: the debts were handshake deals in private games, spread across two countries, with no contracts behind them.

This is the largest alleged figure on this page and also the least verified. What is documented is the roughly $500,000 in named claims from players who said it on camera. The $15 million total exists only as an accusation.

Rick Salomon vs Raad al-Khereiji: $2.8 Million

Status: Court confirmed. Salomon lost, debt ruled unenforceable.

In 2014, Rick Salomon won $2,800,000 from Saudi businessman Raad al-Khereiji in a private Texas Hold’em game at the Tiara Miramar Beach hotel near Cannes. Al-Khereiji told Salomon his lawyer in Los Angeles would arrange payment.

Seven months later, that lawyer said there would be no payment at all. Al-Khereiji’s position was that the session had been a friendly game with no financial stake.

Salomon sued in France. The case went to trial in Grasse in October 2019, and the verdict landed that December.

Salomon’s lawyer said they were considering an appeal to the French supreme court, noting there had been no case law on the 1804 rule since it was written.

This is the most important ruling on this page, and Salomon lost it. He had witnesses, he had the defendant’s gambling records, and he had a promise made in front of a room full of people. None of it mattered, because in France a poker debt is not a debt the courts will collect.

Erick Lindgren: $2.5 Million and Two Bankruptcies

Status: Court confirmed. Litigated and discharged.

Erick “E-Dog” Lindgren was one of the biggest names in poker during the boom years, with a Full Tilt sponsorship and more than $10 million in tournament earnings. In March 2012, a TwoPlusTwo thread started by Haralabos Voulgaris exposed years of unpaid debts across the poker community.

Lindgren was candid about the scale of it. He told Bluff Magazine his debts had “climbed as high as $10 million at one point,” and that he had been “probably $6 million in debt in ’04” before paying back around $3 million of it.

“I tried calling him maybe a dozen times… he never paid it back… ever.”
Howard Lederer on Lindgren’s Full Tilt loan

Lindgren’s case is different from most on this page. He did not scam anyone or take money under false pretenses. He lost enormous sums betting on sports, borrowed to stay in action, and eventually could not cover what he owed.

That distinction matters, but it did not help the people he owed. The debts were real, the money was gone, and bankruptcy discharged most of what remained.

Matt Kirk vs Leon Tsoukernik: The $2 Million Poker Loan

Status: Court confirmed. Ruled unenforceable, case dismissed by agreement.

In May 2017, Australian high-stakes pro Matt Kirk sat down for a late-night heads-up game at the Aria in Las Vegas against Leon Tsoukernik, the Czech businessman who owns King’s Casino in Rozvadov. Tsoukernik was losing heavily and, by his own lawyers’ account, drinking.

Kirk kept lending him money to keep the game running. That is ordinary enough at those stakes, and it is exactly where the trouble starts.

District Judge Linda Marie Bell threw out eight of Kirk’s ten claims and ruled the $2 million an unenforceable gambling debt. The form the money took made no difference to her reasoning.

“Whether in the form of casino chips, cash, or gold bars”
District Judge Linda Marie Bell, ruling that the loan was made for wagering

She did not dismiss the case outright, and that distinction matters. Kirk was left free to pursue the money on grounds of fraudulent inducement and unjust enrichment, so Nevada stopped short of the door France slammed on Salomon.

The countersuit went nowhere. Bell rejected the claim that the Aria and Kirk had conspired to keep Tsoukernik drinking, and ordered Tsoukernik to cover Kirk’s legal costs on it.

Then the case simply stopped. In July 2018 both sides jointly asked the court to dismiss it with prejudice, each bearing its own costs. The order covered Kirk’s complaint, Tsoukernik’s counterclaims and the third-party claims against the Aria.

Nothing in the court file says whether the $2 million was ever paid. A post on the 2+2 forum claimed the two settled amicably out of court, and that forum post remains the only public account of how the case actually resolved.

Three months before that filing, the two men sat down together again at the partypoker Big Game in Montreal. Kirk lost roughly $4.7 million across the series. Tsoukernik finished up about $3.5 million.

That is the pattern worth noticing. The court declined to enforce the debt, the parties settled it privately on terms nobody has ever published, and the two of them went back to playing.

Grayson Hunter Goss: The Disney Star Who Scammed Ludwig for $108,000

Status: Admitted. Not repaid.

Grayson Hunter Goss is a voice actor best known for Disney’s Sofia the First. In 2022 he became one of the most publicly exposed scammers in the poker world, and the amounts involved were not the reason why.

The $1,000 from Rampage is what made the story spread. A man willing to burn his reputation over four figures is a different kind of risk from someone who overextends on a big score.

Goss had no poker results to trade on and no standing in the community. He borrowed against a public persona instead, and it worked twice before anyone compared notes.

David Peters and Dylan Linde: $50,000

Status: Admitted. Partially repaid, balance outstanding.

On April 21, 2026, Dylan Linde published a thread on X explaining why he regretted doing business with David Peters. Peters has close to $50 million in career tournament earnings and one of the best reputations in the high roller community.

The dispute was not about a loan. It was about a staking arrangement that ran the wrong way, which is the most common way poker debts start.

Linde said he only went public after learning of other unpaid debts and bad business deals involving Peters, and felt obliged to warn people.

Peters responded the following day and did not dispute any of it.

“I deeply regret the choices that I made.”
David Peters, April 22, 2026

He described getting into a bad situation, doubling down, and communicating poorly while missing every timeline he set. He committed to paying Linde in full without giving a date.

As of July 2026, there is no public confirmation that the balance has been settled.

The response from other players split. Garrett Adelstein defended his character publicly, while others pointed out that a man with $50 million in cashes was arguing over $23,000.

That is the part that unsettled people. Peters played nine events at Triton Jeju in September 2025, cashing once for $118,000 against at least $630,000 in buy-ins, then missed the PokerGO High Roller series, WSOP Paradise, and the spring Triton stop. His only cash of 2026 before the thread was $13,800 at the WPT Venetian.

For the full timeline and the complete text of both statements, see our report on the Peters and Linde staking dispute.

Chino Rheem: The Unpaid Debts Behind “Chino’d”

Status: Admitted. Partially repaid.

No player is more associated with unpaid poker debts than David “Chino” Rheem. Despite more than $10 million in career earnings and titles including the 2013 WPT Championship and the $1.5 million 2019 PCA Main Event, his name became shorthand for taking money and not giving it back.

The pattern was public by 2011, when Will Molson posted on TwoPlusTwo that Rheem owed him $40,000 after an accidental double transfer of a $20,000 loan. Joseph Cheong was owed a similar amount and Tom Dwan was reportedly owed an undisclosed sum.

Rheem is the clearest example of how poker’s credit system fails. The community knew, talked about it constantly, and kept lending to him anyway, because he was talented enough that the next score always looked close.

The verb “Chino’d” entered poker slang. That is a heavier penalty than any tour ever imposed on him.

Brandon Cantu and Jason Mercier: The Debt Chain

Status: Admitted. Never confirmed as repaid.

Jason Mercier has six WSOP bracelets, more than $22 million in career earnings, and a 2016 Player of the Year title. He also spent years publicly chasing money he said Brandon Cantu owed him.

Mercier called Cantu a “deadbeat” on Twitter and said the debt had gone unpaid for three and a half years without a single payment. Cantu, who has more than $4.2 million in live cashes and once dominated high stakes open-face Chinese games, did not deny owing the money.

His defense was that he could not pay because he had not been paid either.

“owed about a million from other TOP TOP Poker players”
Brandon Cantu, on why he could not settle with Mercier

Unlike Mercier, he refused to name any of them.

That defense is the most honest description of how poker debt actually works. Money owed at the top of the chain stops moving, and everyone below it stops paying too. Nobody involved has a contract, so the only options are to wait, write it off, or post about it.

Mercier never named a figure publicly. On December 31, 2019, he posted a general appeal to the poker community to settle up before the decade ended, without naming anyone at all.

Neither man has confirmed the debt was ever paid.

Staking is how most professional poker gets funded. A backer covers the buy-in, the player returns the stake and splits the profit, and losses carry forward against future wins. Almost none of it is written down, which is why these disputes usually end up on social media rather than in a courtroom.

James Hopkins: AU$400,450 and the Enforceability Question

Status: In litigation. No known outcome.

Australian online pro James Hopkins, who has roughly $1.07 million in online winnings under the name “cmon_gasquet”, was sued by Aidan Hildebrandt and his family over money advanced to him and his company Pocket Punting Pty Ltd.

It started with a $40,000 loan in January 2018, repayable with $14,000 in interest. Eleven more loans followed. The claim eventually reached AU$400,450.

Hopkins did not argue that he had repaid the money. His defense was that he is a problem gambler who lacked the capacity to properly understand the arrangement, and that the Hildebrandts should never have trusted him with it in the first place.

Tom Boyden: The $119,459 Poker Staking Lawsuit

Status: In litigation. No known outcome.

Most poker debts start inside poker. This one started in a fitness equipment company and ended up on a poker table.

The case is worth including because of where the money came from. Backers are usually other poker players who understand the risk they are taking. Here the money belonged to business partners who had no idea they were funding anyone’s action.

Nicholas Palma: Six Figures in Backing Disputes

Status: Allegation only. No lawsuit, no charges.

Nicholas Palma is a tournament professional with around $1.53 million in live cashes. Since 2018 he has been publicly accused by several people of taking backing money and not returning it.

The accusations began with Tim Reilly and were later echoed by Alex Foxen. Here is where it stands.

Eight years on, none of it has been tested anywhere except online.

Almost nothing on this page has reached a criminal court. Poker treats unpaid money as a community matter, settled by reputation rather than by police. These three cases are where that stopped being true.

Only one of them is a conviction for taking money and not giving it back, and the sums involved were trivial. The largest case here ended in six years in federal prison, but he was convicted of hiding what he owed rather than of failing to pay it.

None of these cases involves cheating at the tables. Manipulating the game itself is a separate problem with a separate history, covered in our guide to poker cheating scandals.

Filippos Liakounakos: The $500,000 Bitcoin Theft Charges

Status: Charged. Three felony counts, disposition unknown.

Filippos Liakounakos was a 23-year-old part-time pot limit Omaha player. Police say that in November 2020 he arranged a Bitcoin trade on Telegram while posing as one of the victim’s business associates.

The victim sent $500,000 in Bitcoin, including a $50,000 fee for the supposed seller. Blockchain analysts traced the coins being split into progressively smaller amounts to obscure the trail, a laundering technique known as peeling.

He was never going to be caught on that alone. He was caught because he went back.

Liakounakos attempted a second transaction with the same victim, this time for close to $999,900. That attempt is what unraveled the first one. He was arrested in Las Vegas on March 28, 2022 and booked at the Clark County Detention Center.

This is the only case on the page that was never a debt at all. No loan was made, no stake was sold, and the two men had no relationship beyond a Telegram conversation. Police allege someone impersonated a business associate and took half a million dollars.

Michael Borovetz: The Airport Scams That Funded a Poker Career

Status: Court confirmed. Pleaded guilty, sentence not reported.

Every other case on this page runs from five figures to eight. Michael Borovetz worked in hundreds of dollars at a time, and he pleaded guilty to it.

The routine never changed. He approached strangers in airport terminals with a story about a canceled flight or a lost wallet, asked for a small loan, promised to pay it back, and disappeared.

“approaching passengers with a sad story in an attempt to get money”
Detroit Metropolitan Airport officials, on Borovetz’s method

The money went into tournament buy-ins, including at the WSOP.

Borovetz was not an unknown player scraping by. He has a WSOP Circuit ring and $589,958 in recorded live tournament earnings, and he was still posting cashes in 2018 while the arrests were piling up.

In October 2019 he pleaded guilty in a Michigan court to a single count of theft by false pretenses. Sentencing was set for December 12, 2019, and no outcome was ever reported. He had already served time awaiting the hearing, so time served plus probation was the expected result.

Borovetz sits near the bottom of this page on money and near the top on legal certainty. The difference is not the amount. His victims were strangers in an airport rather than other poker players, so they called the police instead of posting about it.

A man took $200 from a traveler in Newark and was arrested for it, while others on this page walked away from far larger sums with nothing worse than a reputation.

Poker handles its own money internally, and it handles it badly. The case that follows is what happens when someone outside poker starts looking.

Tom Goldstein: The $14 Million He Hid From Mortgage Lenders

Status: Court confirmed. Sentenced to six years in federal prison.

Tom Goldstein argued 44 cases before the United States Supreme Court and co-founded SCOTUSblog. On July 24, 2026 he was sentenced in a federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, and taken into custody in the courtroom.

He was not convicted of failing to pay a poker debt. He was convicted of hiding what he owed, and of not paying tax on what he won.

The debt figures come from two different documents and they do not match exactly. The IRS recorded more than $14 million in poker debts held across two promissory notes, which he left off his 2021 mortgage applications. The indictment described a $15 million gambling debt concealed from the same lenders.

One of those notes traces straight back to a poker table. Goldstein lost heavily to real estate investor Bob Safai across their 2017 matches, and in 2018 signed a promissory note for roughly $6 million he had still not paid.

No source states that the $14 million and the $15 million figures describe the same liability. They cover the same year and the same applications, which makes it likely, but likely is not confirmed and this page does not treat it as such.

The concealment worked. He obtained a $1.98 million loan on a $2.6 million home in Washington, D.C.

Prosecutors said he hid more than $25 million in income between 2016 and 2023 and cost the Treasury over $9.5 million. The restitution actually ordered was $3,103,427, which reflects the counts he was convicted on rather than the government’s full estimate of the loss.

“I have betrayed the trust of people who really loved me”
Tom Goldstein, addressing the court before sentencing

The poker behind it was played at a level almost nobody on this page reached. He won roughly $50 million across heads-up matches in 2016, and a further $51.4 million net from Texas billionaire Andy Beal between May 2022 and May 2024.

He kept far less than that suggests. Investors were taking around 75 percent of the winnings, and he told jurors he is down roughly $10 million on poker across his career.

That is the detail worth sitting with. A man who moved eight figures at a time through other people’s money ended up in prison not for any of it, but for what he told a bank about it afterward.

He has said he intends to appeal.

For the full account of the trial, the verdict and the sentencing, see our report on the Tom Goldstein case.

Almost every case above starts the same way. Money moves between two people who trust each other, on terms nobody writes down, in an industry with no mechanism for collecting when it goes wrong.

Understanding the vocabulary makes the failures easier to see. Here is what the money is actually doing when a poker player says they are staked, in makeup, or selling action.

None of this is unusual or improper. It is how professional poker is funded. The summary above is deliberately brief, because our full guide to how poker staking works covers profit splits, markup and the mechanics properly.

The problem is the enforcement layer, because there isn’t one. A backer who is stiffed has no contract, no regulator, and no realistic route to a courtroom, as Rick Salomon and Matt Kirk both found out.

So the industry substitutes reputation. That works while the player still needs the community, and it stops working the moment they decide they don’t.

There is one more reason these debts get so large before anyone notices. A player who is losing borrows to stay in action, and the person lending is usually another player who understands exactly why, which makes refusing feel unreasonable.

Erick Lindgren described debts reaching eight figures. Chino Rheem kept finding new creditors for years after the first thread went public. In both cases the community knew and lent anyway.

Anyone playing for money should read this next to our guide on bankroll management, because the players who end up on lists like this one almost always got there by playing above their roll first and borrowing second.

Every case above involves money that went missing. This one is here because of what happened after the accusation, and because of how fast the poker community convicts someone when the story is good enough.

In 2023, Hustler Casino Live regular Wenzhi “Wesley” Fei was accused online of running a cryptocurrency scheme that cost an investor $250,000. The accusation also claimed he had sent men to break into the accuser’s home to take evidence. Fei denied all of it.

The claim spread quickly, and a large part of the poker world treated it as settled fact within days.

The player caught in the middle was fellow HCL regular Benjamin “Blank Check Ben” Lee, who had a strained relationship with Fei and was approached precisely because of it.

Lee believed he was funding the purchase of evidence that would expose a fraud. He sent the money in cryptocurrency, in three installments, through a friend in London who handed over cash in person.

“I sent £30,000 in cryptocurrency (broken down into 3 separate payments)”
Benjamin Lee, on the money he paid chasing evidence that did not exist

There was no evidence and no whistleblower. Lee and Fei had been played against each other by the same person, and they only worked it out by comparing notes with Feldman in the room.

The two are now on speaking terms, which is more than most people on this page can say about their counterparts.

Where the original accusation stands is the part worth being precise about. No fraud charges have ever been filed against Fei, and no regulator has taken any action over the crypto project or anything else. Those claims remain unproven allegations rather than legal findings, and Fei continues to deny them.

That is not the same as saying they were disproven. It is the honest position, and it is the reason this case sits in its own section rather than in the table above.

Nothing above happened because the people involved were unusually careless. It happened because poker’s default is a verbal agreement between two people who like each other, and that default holds right up until it doesn’t.

You cannot make a staking deal enforceable. What you can do is remove the ambiguity that turns a disagreement into a year of silence.

What a Staking Agreement Should Actually Say

Seven points. If all seven are written down somewhere before money moves, most of the disputes on this page could not have started.

Warning Signs, and Where They Showed Up

None of these are hypothetical. Every one of them appears somewhere on this page.

What to Do When Someone Does Not Pay

The honest answer is that your options are poor, and they get worse the longer you wait. Rick Salomon had witnesses, records and a promise made in front of a room, and none of it worked.

Ask for settlement at the point you agreed, on the day you agreed it. A backer who lets the first missed date pass without comment has just taught the other person that dates are negotiable.

Keep the record. Screenshots of the original terms cost nothing and are the only thing that distinguishes a debt from a disagreement about what was ever promised.

If the deal ran through a staking platform, use it. Those platforms can restrict accounts and flag users, which is the closest thing to enforcement that exists, and it is what YouStake did with Nicholas Palma’s account.

That leaves going public, which is what almost everyone on this page eventually did. It works, in the sense that reputation is the only currency poker actually enforces.

It also ends the relationship, guarantees that some people will take the other side, and rarely produces the money. Dylan Linde recovered $27,000 of $50,000, and only after seven months of missed settlement dates.

The questions people ask most often about poker debts, staking disputes and what actually happens when someone does not pay.