Ryan Riess: Professional Poker Player Profile

Player snapshot

Full name	Ryan Riess
Nickname	“Riess the Beast”
Nationality	American
Date of birth	June 21, 1990
Born	East Lansing, Michigan
Current base	Las Vegas, Nevada
Live tournament earnings	$16,956,565 (The Hendon Mob, verified 5 June 2026)
Best live cash	$8,361,570 — 2013 WSOP Main Event
WSOP bracelets	1
WPT titles	1
EPT titles	0 (one final table)
All-time money list	Top 100 (98th per The Hendon Mob, mid-2026)
Playing style	Aggressive
Sponsors / team	None current

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Who is Ryan Riess?

Before the cards were even dealt at the 2013 WSOP Main Event final table, Ryan Riess told anyone who would listen that he was going to win it. Not that he hoped to, or that he liked his chances — that he would. Then, at 23 years old and playing in his very first Main Event, he did exactly that, defeating Jay Farber heads-up to claim $8,361,570 and become the 45th world champion in the tournament’s history. The moment he sealed it, he doubled down on ESPN: he thought he was the best poker player in the world.

That single declaration is the through-line of Riess’s career. It made him an instant lightning rod — adored by the fans in “Riess the Beast” T-shirts who stomped through two days of final-table play, and savaged by professionals who thought a one-tournament wonder had no business calling himself the best. More than a decade later, the most interesting question about Riess is not how much he won that night, but what he has done to back up the boast since.

The answer is a career more substantial than his critics predicted and more complicated than a highlight reel suggests. Riess has banked just under $17 million in documented live tournament earnings, added a World Poker Tour title, and come within a single final table of one of poker’s rarest achievements. He is also still grinding — a verified cash on his record is dated as recently as May 2026, a fact that nearly every existing profile of him misses entirely.

Early life and path to poker

Riess grew up in Michigan, attending Waterford Our Lady of the Lakes High School before studying hospitality management at Michigan State University. According to his parents, he had a head for numbers from a young age and was hustling friends in low-stakes basement card games as a kid.

The defining moment of his early life arrived through a television screen. At 14, Riess watched amateur Chris Moneymaker win the 2003 WSOP Main Event — the win that launched the poker boom — and decided then that he wanted to be a professional poker player. He has said that goal never wavered.

After graduating from Michigan State in late 2012, Riess turned to poker full-time, working as a dealer and grinding the tournament circuit. His breakthrough as a player came almost immediately: in October 2012, on what was essentially a whim, he drove to the WSOP Circuit stop in Hammond, Indiana, and finished runner-up in the Main Event for $239,063. That score helped fund the travel that, roughly a year later, would carry him to poker immortality in Las Vegas.

Career timeline and breakthrough

Riess’s career splits neatly into the night that made him and everything he has done to live up to it.

The 2013 Main Event. Riess entered his first WSOP Main Event with little fanfare and made the “November Nine” — that era’s delayed final table — sitting fifth in chips. He outlasted an accomplished field that included two-time bracelet winner JC Tran, bracelet winner Amir Lehavot, and WPT champion Mark Newhouse. Riess eliminated four of his eight final-table opponents before heads-up play, then ground down Farber over roughly 90 hands despite starting the duel at a significant chip disadvantage. The final hand saw Riess’s ace-king hold against Farber’s queen-five. The field had been 6,352 players strong, generating a prize pool of nearly $59.7 million.

The lean years and the WPT win. A Main Event title is a hard act to follow, and for several years Riess’s results cooled relative to that peak. The drought broke in April 2017, when he won the World Poker Tour Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown for $716,088, defeating Alan Sternberg heads-up out of a 349-entry field. The win pushed his career earnings past $10 million and put him in an elite club — at the time, one of only six players to hold both a WSOP Main Event title and a WPT main-tour title.

Two near-misses at history. Riess then mounted a run at the Triple Crown — winning a WSOP, WPT, and EPT main event, a feat only a handful of players have ever completed. He came painfully close twice. In 2018 he finished fourth at the WSOP Europe Main Event, behind eventual winner Jack Sinclair. In 2019 he reached the final table of EPT Monte Carlo, where a victory would have made him roughly the ninth player in history to complete the Crown. He fell in fourth place for €265,620 after his all-in was run down by Wei Huang; Manig Loeser went on to win.

The current grind. In the years since, Riess has settled into the life of a traveling professional rather than a high-roller fixture, posting steady cashes at the WSOP and on the broader circuit without adding a second marquee title. He remains Michigan’s all-time tournament money leader and sits inside the top 100 of poker’s all-time live earnings list.

Key titles and biggest results

Event	Year	Finish	Prize	Notes
WSOP Main Event (WSOP Main Event)	2013	1st	$8,361,570	World champion; field of 6,352
WPT Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown	2017	1st	$716,088	First WPT title; beat Alan Sternberg HU
EPT Monte Carlo Main Event	2019	4th	€265,620	Near-miss at the Triple Crown
WSOP Europe Main Event	2018	4th	(six figures)	Lost out to Jack Sinclair
WSOP Circuit Hammond Main Event	2012	2nd	$239,063	First major recorded cash

What these results reveal is a player defined by one towering peak and a tier of genuinely strong-but-not-winning deep runs beneath it. Riess is not a one-hit wonder — the WPT title and multiple six-figure EPT and WSOP scores rule that out — but his record is also front-loaded around a single life-changing night. He is, at his best, a dangerous final-table presence who has repeatedly knocked on the door of a second defining title without quite breaking through.

Playing style and strategic identity

Riess earned the “Beast” nickname honestly: his game, especially in 2013, was built on relentless aggression. He has been candid about how he beat Farber heads-up, recalling that he raised the button on essentially every hand of their roughly 90-hand duel to force the action and play flops in position with a wide range. He has also been honest that the run of cards helped, noting that in heads-up poker much comes down to hand distribution — a self-aware admission that runs counter to his brash public image.

That image is the other half of his strategic identity. Riess plays, and presents, with conviction. Poker media at the time openly compared his swagger to that of Phil Hellmuth — another world champion who has never doubted his own greatness — and noted that the self-belief made Riess a polarizing figure almost overnight. Whether that confidence is a genuine competitive edge or simply good television has been debated since the night he won.

What is not in dispute is that Riess has spent a decade testing himself against elite fields rather than padding his record. His repeated deep runs in high-buy-in EPT and WSOP events put him across the table from the best players in the world, and he has continued to compete at that level long after the spotlight moved on.

Online poker and cash games

Riess’s reputation is built almost entirely on live tournament play rather than the high-stakes cash-game streams that define many of his contemporaries. He maintains a relatively low profile away from the felt and is not a regular fixture of the televised cash-game circuit. Note that some third-party databases bundle confirmed online tournament results into his totals, which is why certain sites list a higher career figure than the live-only number tracked by The Hendon Mob. Readers comparing sources should treat The Hendon Mob’s live earnings as the cleaner like-for-like measure.

Beyond the felt

Riess relocated from Michigan to Las Vegas, the natural base for a touring professional, and keeps a comparatively quiet public presence for a former world champion. He is active on X (Twitter) under the handle @RyanRiess1. He has not been associated with a major ambassador or sponsorship deal in recent years, and he has spoken in interviews about continuing to play simply because he loves the game — when asked, after his win, why he would keep competing when he had already reached the top, his answer was essentially that there was nowhere he would rather be.

Current status and what to watch

Ryan Riess is still an active professional. His tournament record shows cashes continuing into 2026, including a verified result dated May 2026 — a detail worth emphasizing because most competing profiles of Riess effectively stop updating after his 2017 WPT win. He is no longer a constant presence at the very top of leaderboards, but he remains a credible threat in any field he enters and the most accomplished tournament player Michigan has produced.

The storyline to watch is the one that has driven his entire career: the second title. Riess has a WSOP Main Event and a WPT crown but has twice been a final table away from the EPT win that would complete the Triple Crown. For a player who built his name on the claim that he was the best in the world, finishing that chase — at the EPT, or with a long-awaited second WSOP bracelet — would be the result that recasts the entire decade since 2013.

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