Because data is beautiful, here's a pretty cool animation of the Hendon Mob Money List.

It tells a lot of great stories of famous rises and falls: Hendon Mob Money Race

What you really notice is the influence of:

A.The WSOP Main Event
B. High rollers

I have mixed feelings about the high roller circuit because obviously those guys are elite players who deserve to be regarded among the world's best, but it just creates this steady stream of monster scores that nobody else can compete with. Even a min cash is six figures in a lot of those events whereas you'd have to run super deep in a $1-10k to win $100k+. It effectively means that nobody who isn't playing the high rollers has a chance to make the top 10 on this list anymore.

Out of curiosity, I would like to see a list that excludes all events with fields below 100 runners. Then it wouldn't be purely about who has the biggest bankroll to keep playing high rollers (which admittedly probably has a strong correlation with skill). It wouldn't be a perfect metric either though. If you went that direction, you'd see guys like Cynn and Gold higher than raw merit alone would dictate though since the one major tournament they managed to win happens to be the most lucrative thing you can play for reasonable stakes.

What it does show is that all considered, pound for pound, Erik Seidel is the greatest tournament pro of all time.

Seidel is much taller than Negreanu and likely weighs rather more. I imagine Daniel gets the nod on the pound-for-pound metric you suggest. Seidel is definitely right up there, though, I agree with that.

Negreanu was like 185 when he was winning though

thank you very interesting..... the wsop main event winner jumping close to #1 a few times out of nowhere was annoying

who had the biggest wsop main event $$$$ win? jamie gold?

The guys who actually have the money to play those on their own money are most likely the biggest losers.

Blows my mind Tj Cookier was at the top for almost half of the 2000s lol

Bryn has all his own action and is actually the biggest winner which is hilarious considering all the gto nerds on list.

I would much rather be one of the GTO nerds than Bryn lol. Listening to his logic on Joeys pod was LO****INGL

99% sure thats false

Yes.
I think Fedor didn’t sell any action for several 7 figure scores. And in the SHR bowl where he finished second for $3.5mil he apparently also had a huge piece of Rainer Kempe’s $5mil win. Besides that, guys like him who didn’t have to pay taxes on their winnings had a huge advantage anyway.

Judging by the way he talks about himself (e.g. Ivey "blushing" when Bryn "revealed" his FTP nick name and how he "crushed" him for "huge amounts" when in reality his account was actually losing according to HSDB), it would seem like you´ve only yourself to blame if you take anything he says serious

Um its true he literally said it on Joey's podcast. Aren't you like a scammer or something why are you even here?

He made good on it, which is more than can be said of nearly every scam in history.

If that dude hasn't made that 2+2 thread Zima would have never paid him. he's a scumbag.

If the poker boom never happens...does TJ Cloutier remain the most winningest tournament player of all time?

So fun(ny) to see him grinding $60 and $100 tourneys at Choctaw and Winstar (when they were running)

Haha I was thinking the same, only about Stuey Ungar. For the small number of tourneys he reportedly played, and the short amount of time he was on the scene given his demons, his presence on that chart is pretty impressive. (No surprise, of course, but still hit home on there.)

By the way, those Flourish bar charts never get old to me. It's like visual ASMR or something.

His ROI would be crazy but I imagine his sample size is something like 8....which is why I hesitate to call him the best.

The way Doyle tells it, there weren't many tournaments back then and they were just used as a way to lure people into the cash games, which is where the real money was had.

The stories I've heard suggest that Ungar had some genius-level skills with numbers and memory, but none of the guys who played a lot back them cite him as one of the best overall players (they name people like Moss, Pearson, Doyle, Reese). Seems like Stuey was just an ahead-of-his-time LAG whose style could occasionally run over a tournament field. With there being so few tournaments back then, 1-2 big scores in the right events could easily vault someone towards the top of the list. That can still happen, but the high rollers have made it so that even WSOP Main Event winners don't automatically catapult into the top 10 all-time earners.

Fo sho. The subject of where Stu Ungar ranks in the poker pantheon has come up many times in these forums, and the points you make are the general consensus. In terms of "best player," that's impossible to ever really say about anyone, but probably not applicable to Ungar. There are even some stories that suggest he was a relative fish as a cash player. (One of those accounts was on the PokerCast, for that matter, can't remember who it was.)

But since it shows the results he did have, not the long-term expectation he should have realized, Ungar bar on the graph was the one that stood out the most to me.

And agree with the observation above about T.J. Cloutier. He's one of those guys who was on his way out when I first started following poker, so he's a player I often overlook. But it's interesting to see how long T.J. hovered on or near the top of that list, and it makes sense: 10 six-figure cashes from 1985 through 1998, plus another 12 from 2000 through 2007. Two seconds and a third in the WSOP Main in the pre-boom era. That kind of output will just add up over time.

Sort of reminds me of Karl Malone. He never once led the NBA in scoring (although he seemed to finish second every year). However, he was so consistently good for so long that his career total ranks No. 2 in league history. And that will be the only time T.J. Cloutier is ever compared to Karl Malone.