New Zealand poker players — the all-time money list and the cashes list

New Zealand is a small poker country with a long reach. We hold the top twenty-five of its all-time live money list, from Sosia Jiang's six million dollars down to Jackson Zheng's $377,159 — and alongside it the national cashes list, which ranks the same players in a strikingly different order.

The money list

Sosia Jiang of Auckland leads by a distance with $6,131,533 in recorded live earnings — about two and a half times the total of the player in second. Lee Nelson follows on $2,552,385, then Tong Li on $1,967,618, Thomas Ward of Wellington on $1,938,727 and Hamish Crawshaw of Manawatu on $1,739,079.

Seven New Zealanders have passed a million dollars: those five plus Jan Suchanek on $1,183,058 and JP Rounce-Sue on $1,109,778. Honglin Jiang is eighth and the closest to joining them, a little over ten thousand dollars short on $989,315.

Below the top ten the list tightens considerably. Natalia Rozova in sixteenth sits $112 behind fifteenth place, and Paul Hong in twentieth is $193 behind nineteenth. The largest single step inside the top twenty-five comes at the bottom of it: more than $62,000 separates twenty-fourth from Jackson Zheng in twenty-fifth, which is why we have drawn the line there.

We hold twenty-five of the 1,314 New Zealanders the Hendon Mob ranks. Figures were read on 29 October 2026. Live tournament earnings data courtesy of The Hendon Mob.

The cashes list ranks them differently, and that is the interesting part

Run the same players by number of recorded finishes rather than by money and the order changes almost completely. Graeme Putt is first with 139 cashes — fifteen clear of anyone else — yet he is only twelfth by money, on $827,019. Natalia Rozova is second with 124 and sixteenth by money. Charlton Hawes is third with 121 and fourteenth by money. Nathanial Hutton is fourth with 108 and fifteenth by money. Those four are the only New Zealanders past a hundred recorded cashes, and not one of them is in the national top ten by earnings.

The arithmetic behind that is worth stating plainly. Putt, Rozova and Hawes average between about $5,600 and $6,000 per recorded cash. The players in New Zealand's top ten by money average $20,000 and upwards — JP Rounce-Sue around $30,000. Both are real careers; they are simply different ones. One is built on turning up to everything, the other on a smaller number of large results, and a money list on its own hides the distinction entirely.

Two caveats on the cash counts

First, the Hendon Mob's ranking lists exclude results from recurring events — regular daily, weekly and monthly tournaments. Every cash figure drawn from those lists therefore understates how much poker a player has actually played, and understates it most for exactly the high-volume regulars the cashes list is meant to measure.

Second, a player's own profile page and the national ranking list do not always agree on the number, because they count different things. Sosia Jiang's profile records 49 cashes where the ranking list shows 39; Thomas Ward's shows 75 against the list's 66. Where we give a figure we say which source it came from, and the two are not interchangeable.

Reading any money list honestly

An all-time money list is a record of gross tournament prize money, not profit. It says nothing about buy-ins paid, staking deals, or how much of a result stayed with the player. Someone with two million in recorded cashes over twenty years of entries may have had a leaner career than someone with half that over three seasons. Treat it as a leaderboard of results, not of skill or of wealth.

Why we publish the figures exactly

Career earnings totals get rounded, mis-copied and quoted years out of date across the web, so we publish the exact number and the date we read it. If a figure here does not match one you have seen elsewhere, the date is usually the reason — these totals move every time a player cashes. Three of the five we had previously written up had moved since September.

Where New Zealanders play

The home scene is built around SkyCity Auckland's poker room, Christchurch Casino — which has the country's deepest published cash-game menu and runs the No Limit Hold'em Championships each December — and smaller rooms at SkyCity Hamilton, SkyCity Queenstown and Grand Casino Dunedin. Our New Zealand venues page covers what each actually deals. Most of the money on this list, though, was won abroad: Australia, Las Vegas and the Asian high-roller circuit are where New Zealand results are made.