Peruvian poker players — the all-time money list

Peru's tournament record is held by a small group playing mostly abroad. The national all-time money list runs to 520 ranked players, but the top ten alone account for roughly nine million US dollars of it — a steep curve that tells you more about where Peruvians play than about how many of them play.

Where these numbers come from

Every earnings figure on these pages is taken from The Hendon Mob, the public live-tournament results database, and each player record names the exact page it was read from and the date. We re-check them on a rolling basis because a live earnings total is not a fixed fact: it moves upward every time a listed player cashes, and a single deep run in a big event can move a player several places.

Two cautions worth carrying into any figure you see quoted anywhere, including here. First, a live earnings total counts recorded tournament cashes only — cash-game results, online results and private games are absent, so the number is a floor on what a professional has won rather than a measure of it. Second, it is gross: buy-ins, travel and any staking arrangement all come out of it, and a player with a million dollars listed may have paid a large share of it to backers. The database makes no attempt to net any of that off, and neither should a reader.

What the Peruvian list looks like

The shape of the top ten is unusually uneven. Diego Ventura leads it with about 2.56 million dollars, nearly 40 percent clear of second place, and a single cash of 907,080 dollars accounts for a large part of his total. Behind him the records diverge in an instructive way: Martin Carnero and Gerardo Rodriguez, second and third, have best single cashes of 238,635 and 148,900 dollars respectively, so their career totals have been assembled from long runs of mid-sized results. Felipe Davila in fourth is the opposite case — one result of 405,500 dollars is roughly 60 percent of everything he has recorded.

From fifth place down the list tightens considerably. Under 200,000 dollars separates fifth from eighth, which means this part of the ranking reorders itself whenever one of those players goes deep in a mid-stakes international event. Tenth place sits at about 351,000 dollars — a career figure that a single good week on the festival circuit can produce.

Why the top of the list is an export record

The buy-in levels on Peru's own calendar explain the pattern. A Main Event on the National Series of Poker circuit is typically 500 soles, about 145 US dollars, and Lima's headline events run in the low hundreds. No amount of success at that level builds a seven-figure database total. Every Peruvian name near the top of the national list has therefore built it abroad, on the North American and European festival schedule where the buy-ins are ten to a hundred times larger.

That is the honest frame for reading these pages: they are a record of Peruvians who travel to play, not a measure of the depth of poker inside Peru. For the domestic game, our Peru venues and tournaments pages are the better guide.

A note on names and completeness

The database records the name a player registered under, which is not always the name they are known by, and Peruvian players sometimes appear with one surname where two are used locally. Where our record was built from the ranking page rather than an individual profile, we say so on the page and the best-cash and global-rank fields are left empty rather than estimated. We would rather show a gap than a guess.