Ben Heath: Professional Poker Player Profile

Player Snapshot

Full name	Benjamin Heath
Nationality	British (English)
Born	1992
Hometown	Brighton, England
Current base	London, England
Live tournament earnings	$35,914,136 (Hendon Mob, verified March 2026)
WSOP bracelets	1
Best live cash	$8,160,000 — 2024 WSOP Paradise Triton Million (2nd)
All-Time Money List rank	29th worldwide; 2nd on the England all-time list
Online screen name	1Don’tStop1
Playing style	GTO-led, study-heavy hybrid; calm under pressure
Sponsors / team	Phenom Poker ambassador; coach at GTO Lab

Who Is Ben Heath?

Ben Heath is the British high-stakes tournament professional who turned a first-class honours degree in mathematics into one of the cleanest seven- and eight-figure résumés of the modern Triton era. With more than $35.9 million in verified live earnings as of March 2026, a 2019 WSOP bracelet, and an $8.16 million runner-up finish in the 2024 WSOP Paradise Triton Million, Heath sits 29th on the Hendon Mob’s all-time money list and second among English players, behind only Stephen Chidwick.

Where many high-rollers trade in personality, Heath trades in process. Friends, opponents and broadcasters describe a player who barely flinches at swings most people would not survive emotionally or financially — a stoic, study-heavy operator who spends almost as long preparing for tournaments as he does playing them. His Warwick University dissertation was on game-theory-solvable poker spots and bankroll management, and his career has read, in many ways, as the practical extension of that paper.

This profile traces how a shy maths student from Brighton became a fixture on the Triton and EPT high-roller circuits — and what he does with his time when he isn’t sitting in $500,000 buy-ins.

Early Life and Path to Poker

Heath was born and raised in Brighton, on England’s south coast, in 1992. He was, by his own admission in a PokerListings interview, “pretty awful” at the casual home games he played with friends as a teenager. His serious poker education only began at the University of Warwick, where he read mathematics and graduated with a first-class honours degree.

While at Warwick he played micro-stakes online — $7 and $15 sit-and-gos, then 10NL cash on PokerStars — mostly to fund university life. The change came after graduation, when he moved in with the British pro [[Charlie Carrel]]. Living together effectively converted Heath’s poker into full-time study. He has called the early period a “teacher/student dynamic” that gradually became closer to a partnership, and he credits Carrel with the rate of improvement that took him from 10NL to 200NL Zoom inside six months, then on to live high-rollers from there.

His university dissertation — on solvable spots in poker and on bankroll management — is a useful tell. The same temperament that produced an academic interest in game theory is visible in the player who later became a regular in the world’s toughest fields. Heath has said in interviews that the work he does away from the table is his single biggest strength.

Career Timeline and Breakthrough

Heath’s first recorded live cash, in 2013, was a £14 no-limit hold’em event for a £40 min-cash. By 2015 he had reached his first World Series of Poker final table, finishing sixth in Event #51, the $3,000 Six-Handed No-Limit Hold’em, for $77,591 — a result that quietly hinted at the trajectory.

The breakthrough came in January 2017 at the Aussie Millions Main Event in Melbourne. Heath finished second for A$1,000,000 (around $755,229 at the time), the first life-changing score of his career. Less than a month earlier he had won a $15,000 8-Max event at the PokerStars Championship Bahamas for $141,440. From that point on, his Hendon Mob page filled up with EPT and high-roller side-event cashes.

The legitimacy moment arrived on 3 June 2019 in Las Vegas. Heath won Event #5 of the 50th annual WSOP — the $50,000 No-Limit Hold’em High Roller — for $1,484,085 and his first gold bracelet. He came into the final table as the only player without a bracelet, took the chip lead early, lost it, and reclaimed it before defeating [[Andrew Lichtenberger]] heads-up in a field that included [[Daniel Negreanu]], Nick Petrangelo and Chance Kornuth. The final table also produced the first reported controversy of that year’s Series, when Sam Soverel folded out of turn during a three-way pot; Heath publicly defended Soverel afterwards and noted he believed it was a genuine mistake and that he was calling the all-in regardless.

The next four years were a long, profitable plateau. Heath finished third in the Triton Series London Main Event in August 2019 for $1,642,935, fourth in the 2020 Super High Roller Bowl Russia in Sochi for $1,000,000, and runner-up to [[Adrian Mateos]] in the 2021 WSOP $250,000 Super High Roller for $2,018,148 — at the time the largest score of his career. A third place at the 2022 WSOP $100,000 High Roller and a fifth at the 2023 WPT World Championship kept him firmly inside the high-roller core.

Then came the career peak — so far. In December 2024, at the inaugural WSOP Paradise festival at Atlantis in the Bahamas, Heath finished runner-up to Argentina’s [[Alejandro “Papo MC” Lococo]] in the $500,000 buy-in Triton Million for $8,160,000. Heath got his last chips in with ace-king against Lococo’s king-deuce; the flop reversed the hand and an eight on the river paired the board for two pair, ending Heath’s title run. The cash leapt him from a strong career to one inside the all-time top 30.

He is currently active. In 2025 he placed third in the Triton Series Jeju Main Event for $2,223,000, third in the EPT Malta €100,000 Super High Roller for €310,420, and seventh in the EPT Malta Main Event for €118,650 after running pocket kings into the quad aces of Tomasz Brzezinski at the final table. His most recent recorded cash on Hendon Mob is $86,000 on 18 March 2026.

Key Titles and Biggest Results

Event	Year	Finish	Prize	Notes
WSOP Paradise $500,000 Triton Million	2024	2nd	$8,160,000	Career-best cash; lost AK vs K2 to Lococo
WSOP $250,000 Super High Roller	2021	2nd	$2,018,148	Runner-up to Adrian Mateos
Triton Series Jeju Main Event	2025	3rd	$2,223,000	Largest 2025 score
Triton Series London Main Event	2019	3rd	$1,642,935	First Triton seven-figure
WSOP Event #5 — $50,000 High Roller	2019	1st	$1,484,085	Maiden bracelet; beat Lichtenberger HU
Super High Roller Bowl Russia	2020	4th	$1,000,000	Sochi, $300K buy-in
WSOP $100,000 High Roller	2022	3rd	$806,073	Bally’s / Paris Las Vegas
Aussie Millions Main Event	2017	2nd	$755,229	A$1M; career breakthrough at 24
EPT Malta €100,000 Super High Roller	2025	3rd	€310,420	October 2025

What this table reveals is structural: Heath is a final-table specialist in extremely tough fields. Eight of these nine results are top-four finishes, six of them in events with buy-ins between $50,000 and $500,000. He has only one outright tournament title from this group — the 2019 bracelet — but his deep-run rate against the world’s most concentrated player pool is the headline number. In plain terms, his statistical profile looks like a cash-game grinder’s applied to MTTs: patient, structured, hard to bust without a flip going wrong.

Playing Style and Strategic Identity

Heath’s reputation is for technical precision under pressure. He is GTO-trained but explicitly hybrid: he uses solver-based theoretical baselines in large-field tournaments and shifts toward player-specific exploitative work in the closed Triton high-roller pool, where the same fifty or sixty regulars meet repeatedly.

His preparation discipline is unusual even for the modern era. In a December 2025 interview with poker.org, Heath described tournament stops as “11 days in a row” of poker with study sessions before, after and between events, gym work for a light pre-game routine, and review of his own and opponents’ hand histories at the end of every day. He watches Triton livestreams partly as scouting; with the closed Triton population, the question is no longer what people are doing in general but what this specific opponent is doing.

Off the table, Heath coaches at GTO Lab, where his published focus is final-table ICM, blind-vs-blind dynamics, heads-up play and short-stack reshove ranges — exactly the spots where his own results cluster. That an active top-30 all-time earner spends time coaching is itself unusual; he has said the coaching keeps him sharp between live stops.

Pressed on whether he is bothered by missing additional bracelets, Heath has been characteristically detached. He told poker.org he tries to keep results out of his goal-setting entirely, framing it as something a player cannot control — only volume, preparation and execution.

Online Poker and Cash Games

Heath played most of his early-career hands online under the screen name 1Don’tStop1, climbing from 10NL to mid-stakes Zoom under Carrel’s mentorship before the move to live high-rollers. His online history is therefore foundational to his game rather than a current focus. Modern Heath is overwhelmingly a live-tournament player, with occasional appearances in online high-rollers like GGMillions. He has said in interviews that he plays almost exclusively no-limit hold’em, with some recreational PLO on Phenom Poker — the platform he is an ambassador for.

He has not been a regular feature on US-style streamed cash shows like Hustler Casino Live; his cash-game time is largely private side action attached to live festivals.

Beyond the Felt

Heath is a Phenom Poker brand ambassador and a coach at GTO Lab. He has appeared on several high-profile poker podcasts — most prominently the PokerNews Podcast in August 2019 following his bracelet win, and Jeff Gross’s The Flow Show in January 2024 — but does not host his own show. His Instagram bio describes him as a “Poker player, WSOP bracelet winner, friend of animals.”

That last line is not throwaway. Heath is publicly vegan and a vocal supporter of Animal Equality, the international farmed-animal welfare charity. In a 2024 Phenom Poker interview he described the ability to fund causes he believes in as one of his strong reasons to continue playing so much. It is one of the few personal angles he discusses freely; his interviews otherwise tend to stay on the work itself.

Current Status and What to Watch

Heath is fully active in 2026. His most recent cash on Hendon Mob is dated 18 March 2026, and he was a fixture at WSOP Paradise in December 2025 — playing every Triton event on the schedule and re-entering the $25,000 Super Main Event, by his own count, four times before bagging a healthy Day 1C stack. He cashed for $232,000 in the $100,000 Triton Main Event during that festival. Expect him on most major Triton stops, the EPT high-roller circuit and the WSOP summer schedule.

The next twelve months are a chance for Heath to do two things he has not yet done: win a Triton title outright and add a second WSOP bracelet. Both feel overdue given the volume of final tables. Whether the 2024 Triton Million heads-up loss is the closest he comes to a $500K-buy-in title, or merely his first attempt, is the live storyline.

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