Stu Ungar Net Worth 2026: Died Broke After $30M in Winnings & 3 WSOP Main Events

Stu Ungar died with about $800 in his pocket after winning an estimated $10 million to $30 million at cards. The only man to win three WSOP Main Events at the table left no estate, and his tracked record of $3,677,961 covers a fraction of what he played for.

He won the Main Event in 1980, 1981 and 1997 and took Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker three times when it was the second biggest title in poker. Sixteen months after the 1997 comeback he was found dead in a budget motel on the Strip, aged 45.

This profile separates the verified record from the legend and prices his three Main Event wins in today’s money. Among the champions in our poker player profiles, he is the only one whose estate was worth nothing.

Stu Ungar’s net worth at death was effectively zero. He was found with a few hundred dollars, the last of a $25,000 advance from casino owner Bob Stupak, and nothing else to settle.

Set against that estate is a career that produced eight figures in gross winnings across gin, poker and blackjack. Both numbers are true, and every published “Stu Ungar net worth” figure is one or the other without saying which.

Why do Stu Ungar net worth figures range from $0 to $30 million?

The spread comes from measuring different things. The Las Vegas Sun’s obituary put his career at $10 million won and lost; the authorised biography by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson settled on $30 million; the tournament databases only see the fraction played on a public stage.

No source claims he ever held that money for long. He kept cash in hotel safe deposit boxes rather than a bank, owned no property on record, and by November 1998 had signed his future winnings to Stupak in exchange for debt cover.

What can we verify about Stu Ungar’s earnings?

The Hendon Mob records $3,677,961 across 36 cashes, which now places him around 790th on the all-time money list from a peak of first. WSOP.com accounts for $2,081,478 of that across 16 cashes and 12 final tables.

Both totals are incomplete by design. The database era began years after his peak, so 1970s gin matches, 1980s private games and most of his casino play leave no trace at all.

The $1,000,000 above is the single largest sum he was ever photographed with, and the last one he collected.

Where the money came from

Five streams fed the bankroll and one emptied it. Only the first is auditable.

His backers said the same thing for twenty years: the winnings were real, the leaks were bigger. The money habits recorded in Personal Life below explain how a seven-figure prize lasted two months.

Ungar’s recorded results run from a second place in the 1980 WSOP $5,000 Seven Card Stud to the $1,000,000 that closed his career in May 1997. Sixteen of his 36 cashes were wins, and all ten of his largest cashes were first places.

That ratio is the story. He rarely entered anything below a championship buy-in, and when he entered, he usually won.

Top ten tournament cashes

The list runs almost entirely through no-limit hold’em championship events at $5,000 or more. The 1991 Queens Classic win was his last significant result before the six-year gap that preceded 1997.

Nine of those ten cashes came before 1992. The gap that followed was not a change of schedule; it was the years he could not raise a buy-in.

What was Stu Ungar’s biggest win?

The 1997 Main Event paid $1,000,000 for beating a field of 312 at Binion’s Horseshoe, his largest cash by a distance. Half of it went to Billy Baxter, who had put up the $10,000 buy-in, so the take-home was $500,000 before the bookmakers got involved.

Two months later he was broke again. The Las Vegas Sun reported he dropped $1.8 million on football the same weekend he collected the prize.

Complete WSOP bracelet list

Three of the five are Main Events. The other two show his range: a $10,000 Deuce to Seven Draw over 1978 champion Bobby Baldwin, and a $5,000 Seven Card Stud over Dewey Tomko. For the full picture of the series he dominated, see our complete guide to the WSOP.

Super Bowl of Poker: the second crown

Amarillo Slim’s Super Bowl of Poker ran through the 1980s as the only title that rivalled the WSOP. Ungar won its $10,000 main event in 1984, 1988 and 1989, the only player to take it three times and the only one to win it alongside the WSOP Main Event.

Those three wins paid $690,000 combined, more than either of his first two Main Event prizes and nearly a fifth of his tracked career total. Where the event sits against the modern circuit is covered in our look at the most prestigious poker tournaments today.

Only two players have won the Main Event three times, and Johnny Moss received his first title by a vote of his peers in 1970. Ungar won all three at the table, across 17 years, against two different generations of opponents.

Adjusted for inflation, the three first prizes are worth about $4.7 million combined in today’s money, under half what a single modern Main Event pays for first. The full roll of honour is in our list of every WSOP Main Event champion since 1970.

Each title came in a different era of the game: a 73-player pro field, a 75-player defence, and a 312-player event in the year before online poker existed.

1980: the first hold’em tournament he ever played

Ungar told ESPN’s Gabe Kaplan years later that the 1980 Main Event was the first Texas hold’em tournament he had entered. He beat ten-time bracelet winner Doyle Brunson heads-up, in a field of 73, with Brunson chasing what would have been a record third title.

Brunson said afterwards it was the first time he had watched a player improve as the tournament went on. At 26, Ungar was the youngest champion in the event’s history, and Phil Hellmuth broke that record in 1989 at 24.

1981: back-to-back, and almost barred

Days before the 1981 series, Benny Binion banned him from the Horseshoe for spitting at a dealer after losing a big pot in a cash game. Jack Binion talked his father round on the grounds that the defending champion sold tickets.

He then won the $10,000 Deuce to Seven Draw over Bobby Baldwin for $95,000 and, one day later, beat Perry Green heads-up for the $375,000 title. He is one of four players to defend the Main Event:

Nobody has done it since Chan, and the modern field sizes make a repeat close to impossible.

The 1980s were his peak and his plateau. He kept winning the biggest events on the calendar while the money went out faster than it came in.

What happened at the 1990 WSOP Main Event?

Ungar held the chip lead deep into the 1990 event. On the morning of day three he did not appear, and he was found unconscious on the floor of his hotel room from a cocaine overdose.

He went to hospital while the dealers blinded off his stack. The lead was large enough that he still finished ninth for $25,050 without playing another hand, the only Main Event he entered and did not win.

1997: the comeback

By 1997 he was broke, in debt and physically wrecked, spending the night before the event trying to borrow the buy-in. Baxter put up the $10,000 minutes before registration closed, making Ungar the last of 312 names on the sheet.

He nearly fell asleep at the table on day one and told Mike Sexton he could not make it. After that he arrived rested each morning, built a large lead, and carried it to the only Main Event final table ever played outdoors, on Fremont Street.

The final hand against John Strzemp was A-4 against A-8 on an A-5-3 flop, and a deuce on the river made Ungar a wheel. He showed Kaplan the photo of Stefanie he had carried all week and dedicated the win to her. The local press named him The Comeback Kid.

Stuart Errol Ungar was born on 8 September 1953 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His father, Isidore “Ido” Ungar, ran a bar called Foxes Corner that doubled as a bookmaking operation, and tried without success to keep his son away from the customers’ habits.

Ungar skipped seventh grade and left school in tenth. His father died of a heart attack in July 1967, his mother was later disabled by a stroke, and by his mid-teens he was supporting the household at gin rummy.

Victor Romano and the New York years

At 18 he was taken up by Victor Romano, a reputed organised crime figure and one of the best card players in the city. Romano gave him protection as much as tutoring, because Ungar’s habit of insulting weaker opponents made enemies in dangerous rooms.

By 1976 he was regarded as the best gin player in New York. Racetrack debts eventually drove him out, first to Miami and then, in 1977, to Las Vegas.

Was Stu Ungar the best gin rummy player ever?

The case rests on one match. He beat Harry “Yonkie” Stein, widely rated the best gin player of the era, 86 games to none in Hollywood Gin, and Stein stopped playing professionally afterwards.

After that nobody would play him. An early Las Vegas opponent, Billy Baxter, lost $40,000 to a player so small that a Coca-Cola crate had to be put on his chair. To find action at all, Ungar started giving handicaps:

Casinos running gin tournaments asked him not to enter because other players would withdraw. His own verdict, recorded for the biography, was that someone might one day play no-limit hold’em better than him, but nobody would ever play gin better.

Blackjack, card counting and the Bob Stupak bet

Ungar’s memory made him a card counter every Las Vegas pit barred within a few years. In 1982 a New Jersey casino accused him of capping a bet; he refused the $500 fine because paying meant admitting guilt, and won in court at a cost of about $50,000.

The Stupak bet is the documented test of what he could do. Per WSOP.com, Stupak wagered $10,000 that Ungar could not count down a two-deck shoe and name the last card; after the 103rd card Ungar called the ten of diamonds.

The two versions in circulation differ on every number except the outcome:

We publish the official version. Either way, the point stands: no casino in Las Vegas would deal him a blackjack hand after the early 1980s.

Ungar played no-limit hold’em the way he played gin: he attacked every hand, kept his chips in motion, and bluffed when the timing said so. Mike Sexton said his stack never sat still, and a rival at the 1997 series described his reads as clairvoyant.

The aggression was built on memory rather than mathematics. He had never played a hold’em tournament before the 1980 Main Event; he learned opponents in real time and bet them off hands he could name.

Did Stu Ungar have a photographic memory?

Friends and backers believed so, and WSOP.com still describes him as rumoured to have a genius IQ and a photographic memory. No test result exists, and the IQ numbers that circulate online have no source.

What is documented is the Stupak two-deck bet and a 1992 heads-up match against 1990 world champion Mansour Matloubi. Matloubi moved all-in for $32,000 as a river bluff on a 3-3-7-K-Q board; Ungar told him he held four-five or five-six, called with ten-high, and was right.

The posture in that photograph is the tell: leaning in, chips loose in front of him, working the opponent rather than the cards.

The reputation problem

His backers made the same complaint for twenty years: he could have won far more by hustling. A player who lets opponents believe they can win keeps them coming back, and Ungar wanted them destroyed and told them so.

That cost him action everywhere he went, and it cost him allies.

The line is quoted widely for a reason. It comes from inside his circle and treats the talent and the waste as the same story.

The cocaine started around 1979, the year his mother died, on the advice of other players who used it to stay awake through marathon sessions. Recreational use became dependency within a few years, and by the mid-1980s his friends were offering to pay for rehab anywhere in the world.

He refused every time. His reasoning, recorded in the biography, was that people he knew had found drugs easier to get inside rehab than on the street.

Sports betting: the bigger leak

Drugs took his health; sports and horses took the money. The swings his friends and the Las Vegas press recorded give the scale:

After the 1997 Main Event he relapsed within weeks and was broke within two months. Stefanie persuaded him to stop several times; each attempt lasted a matter of weeks.

What the coroner found

On 20 November 1998 he checked into room 6 of the Oasis Motel at 1731 South Las Vegas Boulevard, a budget property at the end of the Strip. A motel employee found him dead in the room around 10:30 a.m. on Sunday 22 November. He was 45.

Two days earlier he had signed a contract with Bob Stupak to clear his debts and stake his tournament play. About $800 of the $25,000 advance was in his pocket. Where the rest went is not known.

Stupak took up a collection to pay for the funeral. Ungar is buried at Palm Valley View Memorial Park in East Las Vegas, and the fuller account of his last year is in our full Stu Ungar story feature.

The 1998 Main Event he skipped

Baxter offered the buy-in again in 1998. Ten minutes before the start, Ungar told him he was too tired to play; he admitted later that after weeks of heavy use, turning up in that condition would have been worse than not turning up.

It was the last Main Event he could have played.

Ungar reunited in Las Vegas with Madeline Wheeler, a girlfriend from his New York years, and the two married in 1982. Their daughter Stefanie was born the same year.

Who was Stu Ungar’s wife?

Madeline Wheeler was married to him from 1982 until their divorce in 1986. She stayed in Las Vegas and raised Stefanie there; at his death, Stefanie was a 16-year-old sophomore at Bishop Gorman High School.

Ungar legally adopted Madeline’s son from her first marriage, Richie, who took the Ungar surname and idolised him. Richie died by suicide in 1989, shortly after his high school prom.

Stefanie Ungar

Stefanie was the one person he reliably answered to. He carried her photo through the 1997 series, phoned her with daily updates, and made his few attempts at sobriety at her request.

Friends described the relationship as the one fixed point in a life without any others.

She has spoken publicly about him since, starting with a Las Vegas Sun interview the week he died, and in 2025 the family sold his life-story rights to television. Her own description at the time of his death was of a generous man without a mean bone in his body.

Money habits

The habits his friends recorded explain the estate better than any single loss:

Generosity was the flip side. He covered a friend’s mortgage for months unasked, handed his lawyer $10,000 on hearing he was short, and gave a stranger on the street $100 with the remark that a name would have cost him $200.

Ungar’s afterlife in media has outlasted his career. The 2003 film High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story, with Michael Imperioli in the lead, tells the story in flashback from the motel room; it was made without the family’s cooperation and is based loosely on the record.

It appears in our ranking of the best poker movies, and the more reliable screen record is ESPN’s 2006 documentary One of a Kind, which used tapes Ungar recorded in his last year.

The authorised biography

One of a Kind, by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson, was published by Atria Books in 2005 and remains the primary source for most of what is known about his life. It draws on tapes Ungar recorded in his last year for an autobiography that was never finished.

In April 2025 The Hollywood Reporter reported that screenwriter Eric Roth and his son Geoff had secured the family’s life-story rights for a scripted television project, the first authorised screen version.

The project is still the only version with the family’s cooperation, and until it airs the biography remains the record of reference.

Poker Hall of Fame and the records

Ungar was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2001, three years after his death, and WSOP.com ranked him third in its 2009 list of the 40 greatest champions. He appears alongside every Poker Hall of Fame inductee in our members list.

Nobody has won a third Main Event since 1997, and no player has approached ten wins from thirty championship events.

Both records were set in rooms that held a few dozen professionals. The game he beat no longer exists.

He never saw the boom. Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 Main Event win arrived five years after his death, and the televised game that followed made his 1997 final table, taped by ESPN, a fixture of the era’s highlight reels.

The active story in 2026 is the television adaptation. Eric Roth, whose credits include Forrest Gump and Dune, and his son Geoff hold the family’s exclusive life-story rights, and the project is the first authorised dramatisation since the 2003 film. No cast, network or air date has been announced.

The records have not moved. His tracked earnings sit around 790th all-time, drifting down each summer as modern payouts pass him, while the titles that matter have not moved.

Stefanie Ungar remains the family’s voice on the project, and the 2025 rights deal was negotiated on the family’s behalf. For the rest of the poker world, follow our latest poker news coverage.

This player profile separates verifiable facts from estimates and public claims. We cannot accurately calculate any player’s net worth, but we aim to publish transparent, verifiable information.

How we handle ‘net worth’

Net worth figures for poker players are inherently speculative. We publish a range rather than a single number, explain the inputs that inform it, and flag what cannot be verified.

For Ungar the estate figure and the winnings figure are reported separately, because the two are routinely conflated. The inflation values for his Main Event prizes use US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U annual averages and are rounded.

How we report earnings

Tournament earnings on this profile are sourced from The Hendon Mob, which tracks live tournament cashes globally. We cite cash counts and earnings totals as gross payouts, not profit.

Ungar’s career predates systematic results tracking, so his recorded total is a floor rather than a complete account. Where a prize was split with a backer, we say so.

How we cover controversies

Where controversies exist, we report verified facts and clearly sourced claims without editorialising or assigning blame. Cause of death is taken from the Clark County Coroner’s ruling as reported by the Las Vegas Sun.

Anecdotes with a single unverifiable source, including the IQ figures that circulate online, are either attributed as rumour or left out.