Deputy Editor
Poker players, fans, and media are getting a bit of a “be careful what you wish for” situation with the release of the so-called “Triton Files,” a sort of exposé showing the public which players have won and lost at Triton Poker Series.
For years, observers have lamented the opacity of inflated numbers listed as poker tournament winnings. All of these regulars rack up millions of dollars in cashes, but how much have they actually won? Have they even won? Are they all broke and staked? Find these questions and more in the comments section of every single discussion of poker tournament results in the past decade or more.
Well, now that the public has gotten a taste of what some asked for, have these data-scraping sites opened Pandora’s Box that someone needs to jam shut?
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Important Notes and Caveats on Triton Files
First, let’s outline a few realities that help frame the overall discussion properly.
To start, it’s important to note that, yes, poker tournament results should absolutely be taken with a heaping helping of salt. My own Card Player profile lists almost $1 million in tournament cashes. I can tell you that I don’t have $1 million, nor have I made anything particularly close to that playing tournament poker. I can’t tell you the exact number because I didn’t keep very diligent track of my results until a few years ago. But my best guess is that, between selling action and the obvious losing stretches, I’ve profited closer to $250,000.
Next, let’s address the sample size. According to the results published by MTTDB, Triton has held 303 individual poker tournaments. That’s not a realistic sample from which one can glean anything meaningful.
Most public sources say a reasonable sample of poker tournaments starts around 500 at the very low end. More realistically, players need 1,000 or more before they can start drawing conclusions.
A player could have potentially fired 500 times at Triton if they played every single event at the published average of 1.67 entries per player per tournament. But at that point, we run into the issue that the data stretches back to 2016. The player pool and individual talent levels have changed in that time frame.
Finally, players could have bought, sold, and swapped action.
So, listing Isaac Haxton as a $7.7 million loser doesn’t actually tell us anything on multiple levels. Jumping to the conclusion that a guy who has been at the top of the game for decades is washed up because he’s stuck over a relatively small sample at Triton is not only silly, it could be flat out wrong.
Poker Operators Have Opened Themselves Up to Results Being Scraped
The next thing of note is the interesting reality that poker operators have actually handed out the opener to this particular can of worms.
Both the World Series of Poker and the Triton Poker Series have opted to make it publicly available how many times a player has entered a given event.
Sure, they don’t just make a list of how many times each player has entered. But the info is out there if someone wants to collect it, because they track each player’s bustouts within their own data. So, if a player enters, then zeroes out, then has chips again, a data-scraping tool can figure out that they re-entered. An enterprising individual can use that information, cross-checked against results, to figure out profit and loss.
I wasn’t in the meetings when folks working for WSOP and Triton discussed these products, so I have no idea whether this eventual possible use came up during planning. There’s no doubt that WSOP+ has been a massive value-add for players.
But it has also opened a can of worms that the WSOP (and Triton, for that matter) would probably prefer wasn’t a thing.
Are Publicly Available Results Good for Poker?
Reactions to the Triton Files have been all over the place. Mike Matusow crowed that the high roller scene is a “mirage” while mistakenly saying 10 players in the entire pool turned a profit (it’s actually 347 out of about 1,240, according to MTTDB’s data). Derek Kwan called it “incredible analysis.” Jesse Sylvia had quite a different reaction:
This is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen for poker https://t.co/0t730SAWG4
— Jesse Sylvia (@MrJesseJames4) June 27, 2026
I fall more in with Sylvia’s line of thinking here. I understand that fans of the game want to know the biggest winners and losers. But at the end of the day, a person’s poker results are between them and their tax guy/gal.
One of the beautiful and frustrating things about live tournament poker is that variance largely rules. Even if we want to be nosy and know everyone’s results, it really doesn’t tell us all that much because of the sample size issues discussed above. Yes, Santhosh Suvarna is probably a whale. But what good does it do to trumpet that to everyone? Let him blast away in peace.
Besides, what are all the dregs of poker society going to fill the comments sections with if everyone’s results become public?
Where Does Data Protection in Poker Go From Here?
Last month, I profiled Art Parmann and his AI-powered poker assistant, Ask Charlotte. Like MTTDB, Parmann’s database procures results from the publicly available info on the WSOP+ app. I asked Parmann about the moral implications of publicizing people’s poker results, and it gave him pause. It was clear he hadn’t considered that particular aspect of the product, and he admitted as much.
I didn’t include all of his quotes on the matter, but he had some interesting thoughts:
Theres probably a reason that Hendon Mob doesn’t have buy-ins or whatever listed. It’s probably better for poker if there’s not P&L on everything. I haven’t thought deeply about any of the moral implications of the project … I don’t think it really hurts anyone. Texas Mike knows he’s losing. He’s there to gamble. He’s not coming to beat Shaun Deeb in every tournament, he’s coming to put people in the hurt locker, and sometimes it works out. That’s my read. Texas Mike, if you want to DM me and tell me to take your stuff off, I will.
Is that last part where we’re going? General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-style poker results, where players can opt in or out of having their play tracked?
When I worked at PokerNews, we had a rather annoying compliance process where European players could request to have their names deleted from the reporting after the fact. Someone would have to go back and anonymize all live reporting mentions of the player to comply with GDPR. Tournament result database Hendon Mob has a similar procedure. That’s why you’ll sometimes find lists of results that include “Unknown Player.”
I’m not an expert on GDPR or European law, so I’m not sure whether these processes only apply to European players or not. But maybe we’re heading toward a reality where players have to actively opt out of this sort of tracking, or their results will be scraped.
The other obvious solution is for operators to move these results out of the public eye or block them from bots via captchas or some other technical means. Again, this is beyond my area of knowledge. I only know how to play cards and write about them.
But it’s hard to imagine Triton and WSOP being thrilled with people publishing these results. I have to imagine some change is coming. But for now, poker players’ results are being laid bare, and I don’t think that’s great for the game.
Image credit: WPT/Flickr (license)
