Player snapshot
- Full name: Antanas Guoga
- Known as: Tony G (“The Australian Airbag”)
- Nationality: Lithuanian-Australian
- Date of birth: 17 December 1973
- Born: Kaunas, Lithuania
- Current base: Lithuania
- Live tournament earnings: $11,295,296 (The Hendon Mob, verified June 2026)
- Career-best live cash: $1,389,436 (Triton Madrid, 2022)
- WSOP bracelets: 0
- WPT titles: 0 (career-best: runner-up, 2004 Grand Prix de Paris)
- EPT titles: 0 (career-best: 3rd, EPT High Roller, 2009)
- Other major wins: Super High Roller Bowl Europe short-deck event, 2021
- Playing style: Hyper-aggressive, psychological, verbal
- Career cashes: 144 (The Hendon Mob)
Who is Tony G?
Tony G is the player other players were afraid to sit next to — not because of his ranges, but because of his mouth. Born Antanas Guoga, the Lithuanian-Australian built his reputation during the mid-2000s poker boom as the circuit’s pantomime villain, a relentless table-talker who turned needling opponents into something close to a competitive discipline. He is one of the few professionals whose net worth and reputation owe as much to what he said at the table as to what he won there.
The numbers behind the noise are real. According to The Hendon Mob, Guoga has banked more than $11.29 million in live tournament earnings across 144 recorded cashes, which makes him comfortably the most successful Lithuanian tournament player in history. Yet he has never won a World Series of Poker bracelet, and his single career-best result — a runner-up finish worth roughly $1.39 million — did not come until 2022, nearly two decades into his career. The gap between his fame and his trophy cabinet is, in a sense, the whole story.
Because the more interesting fact about Tony G is what he became when the cameras moved on. In an era defined by household names like Daniel Negreanu, Guoga did something almost none of his peers attempted: he stepped away from the felt almost entirely to become a sitting Member of the European Parliament, founded a string of betting and blockchain businesses, and — in the most on-brand twist imaginable for a lifelong gambler — won a 2025 Melbourne Cup as a racehorse owner. The villain persona is the part everyone remembers. It is also the part that hides the most.
Early life and path to poker
Guoga was born in Kaunas in 1973, in Soviet-era Lithuania, and spent part of his childhood in the Alytus district before emigrating to Melbourne, Australia, at the age of 11. According to several poker biographies he showed an early aptitude for strategic games — including a reported Lithuanian Rubik’s Cube championship as a boy — though the most reliably documented detail of his teenage years is far more ordinary: a string of odd jobs in Australia that, per his Wikipedia biography, included repairing sewing machines and washing cars.
Two threads from his youth would echo through his entire career. The first was a finance-and-numbers instinct that pushed him toward investing and entrepreneurship long before poker paid the bills. The second was a teenage habit of betting on horse racing — a detail that reads as trivia until you reach the end of his story. He began playing poker seriously around the age of 18, moving quickly from Melbourne card rooms into the high-stakes cash and international tournament scene.
Crucially, Guoga was an entrepreneur before he was a poker celebrity. In the early 2000s he founded the poker media site PokerNews — reportedly buying the domain for around $6,000 and building it into one of the industry’s largest news and affiliate operations before selling out his interest later in the decade. That business background matters: Tony G never depended on tournament cashes the way a pure grinder does, which helps explain both his fearlessness at the table and his eventual willingness to walk away from it.
Career timeline and breakthrough
Guoga’s competitive arc breaks cleanly into four phases.
The boom-era breakout (2004–2007). Tony G first registered on the international radar with a runner-up finish at the 2004 World Poker Tour Grand Prix de Paris, worth around $411,000. He followed it with a run of titles away from the American spotlight: a European Poker Championships Main Event win in London in 2005 (£260,000), the Betfair Asian Poker Tour Main Event in 2006 ($451,700), and the Moscow Millions Main Event in 2007 ($205,000). These were the years he became television’s favourite antagonist, sparring with the likes of Mike Matusow — whom he beat in the 2006 Bad Boys of Poker II televised event, a novelty exhibition rather than a ranking WPT title — and feuding with British veteran Dave Ulliott, the player known as “Devilfish.”
The peak persona (2008–2011). This was the apex of Tony G the character. His clashes with Phil Hellmuth on PokerStars’ The Big Game, and his on-camera tirades against opponents such as Ralph Perry, turned him into one of the most-replayed personalities in poker. His results stayed strong without ever producing a signature trophy — a 10th-place finish at the 2009 WSOP 40th Anniversary event ($172,120) and a third-place finish at an EPT High Roller the same year ($552,239) were typical: deep, lucrative, but short of the win.
The political exit (2014–2019). Then he essentially disappeared from the game. According to The Hendon Mob, Tony G recorded zero live tournament cashes between 2014 and 2017 — a near-total competitive blackout that coincided exactly with his term as a Member of the European Parliament. For a player of his profile, this is an extraordinary and underreported gap: at the height of his fame he chose Brussels over the Bellagio.
The high-roller return (2019–2022). When he came back, he came back richer. Guoga reinvented himself as a short-deck specialist on the super-high-roller circuit. He finished fourth in the €250,000 Super High Roller at WSOP Europe in Rozvadov in 2019 (€799,045), won a short-deck event at the 2021 Super High Roller Bowl Europe in Cyprus for $1,196,000, and finally posted his career-best score in 2022: a runner-up finish in the €100,000 Short Deck event at the Triton Poker Series in Madrid worth roughly $1.39 million. That remains, per The Hendon Mob, his last recorded live cash.
Key titles and biggest results
| Event | Year | Finish | Prize | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Triton Series Madrid, €100K Short Deck | 2022 | 2nd | ~$1,389,436 | Career-best live cash |
| Super High Roller Bowl Europe, $100K Short Deck (Cyprus) | 2021 | 1st | $1,196,000 | Biggest tournament win |
| WSOP Europe, €250K Super High Roller (Rozvadov) | 2019 | 4th | ~$799,045 | Largest WSOP-branded cash |
| EPT High Roller | 2009 | 3rd | ~$552,239 | Deep EPT run |
| European Poker Championships Main Event (London) | 2005 | 1st | ~£260,000 | Early signature title |
| Betfair Asian Poker Tour Main Event | 2006 | 1st | $451,700 | Asian-circuit win |
| WPT Grand Prix de Paris | 2004 | 2nd | ~$411,315 | International breakout |
| Moscow Millions Main Event | 2007 | 1st | $205,000 | — |
| WSOP 40th Anniversary NLH | 2009 | 10th | $172,120 | Best Las Vegas WSOP cash |
Read collectively, the record tells an honest story. Tony G is a high-variance, high-ceiling tournament player who has cashed 20 times at the WSOP for over $1.6 million without ever closing one out for a bracelet — his best Las Vegas finish is sixth. He is not a Main Event grinder or a consistent final-table machine; he is a big-game specialist whose best results cluster in short-deck and super-high-roller formats, where deep pockets, aggression and a willingness to gamble are rewarded. The trophy cabinet is thinner than the bank balance, and that is the accurate read.
Playing style and strategic identity
Tony G’s edge was never purely technical. It was psychological warfare, delivered out loud. Where most professionals treat the table as a place to hide information, Guoga treated it as a stage on which to extract it — needling, taunting and provoking opponents into emotional decisions. He has been candid that the chatter is deliberate: talk, in his framing, is a legitimate tool for pulling information out of opponents and putting them on tilt, not random rudeness.
The defining example is a hand against Phil Hellmuth on The Big Game. While Hellmuth was sizing up a raise, Guoga moved all in and announced he was doing it “blind,” without having looked at his cards — which was untrue, as the cameras and everyone but Hellmuth could see. He held ace-king, dominated Hellmuth’s ace-jack, and when Hellmuth protested the deception, delivered the line that has followed him ever since: “Of course I lied. It’s poker.” It is the cleanest possible distillation of his strategic identity — manipulation framed, not unreasonably, as the essence of the game.
His style is intuition-and-pressure based rather than modern GTO-trained: aggressive preflop, fearless postflop, and built to thrive in loose, ego-heavy line-ups rather than in solver-driven environments. At final tables he leans into the chaos, using his table image — opponents expect madness, so genuine value bets get paid. The complicating note, repeated by professionals and dealers who know him, is that the on-camera villain bears little resemblance to the man away from the table, where he is widely described as personable and easygoing. The aggression, in other words, is largely a costume he chooses to wear.
Beyond the felt
Guoga’s business and public life dwarfs most poker careers in sheer breadth. He founded the betting brand TonyBet in 2009, which Swedish operator Betsson acquired in 2016 (reported at around €6 million) before the brand was wound down around 2020. He launched the BlockChain Centre Vilnius in 2017, helped create the cryptocurrency poker room CoinPoker (from which he has since stepped back), and has more recently been associated with Cyberphunk Holdings and a portfolio of crypto and gaming ventures. In February 2025 he claimed to have made $100 million from business in the previous year — a figure that, like most of his financial claims, is unverified and should be treated as his own assertion rather than established fact.
His political career was no sideline. Guoga served as a Member of the European Parliament for Lithuania’s Liberal Movement from 2014 to 2019, briefly leading the party in 2016 during a domestic bribery scandal, and was later elected to Lithuania’s national parliament, the Seimas, on the Labour Party list in 2020 before resigning the seat in 2021. He has also been a major patron of Lithuanian sport, funding the national basketball team’s wild-card entry to the 2010 FIBA World Championship and founding the Lithuanian Poker Federation. He is married to model Aistė Šlapokaitė, with whom he has two sons, Herkus and Tauras; he has additional children from previous relationships, for a reported total of six.
Controversies and complex reputation
Tony G’s table talk is inseparable from his legacy, and not all of it ages well. His most infamous incident was a televised confrontation with Russian-born player Ralph Perry, during which Guoga told Perry he would send him “back to Russia” — a line that read to many as crossing from gamesmanship into something uglier. His verbal feud with Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott was equally vicious, with the British pro responding in kind. Guoga’s own framing, offered in later interviews, is that the talk was a strategic device aimed at tilting opponents rather than a personal attack, and he has at times expressed a grudging fondness for players he targeted, such as Surinder Sunar.
How a reader weighs this depends on taste. Defenders argue Guoga was a much-needed entertainer who helped drag poker into the mainstream during its boom years, and that the persona was theatre. Critics counter that some of the lines went beyond sport. Both readings have support, and the record is documented on camera for anyone who wants to judge for themselves.
Current status and what to watch
On the tournament felt, Tony G has gone quiet — his most recent recorded live cash dates to September 2022. But “retired” would be the wrong word for a man whose 2025 was arguably his most eventful year in a decade. He resurfaced on the high-stakes livestream circuit, including cash games on Hustler Casino Live and at the Triton Poker Series, re-ignited his rivalry with Phil Hellmuth on a 2024 podcast by issuing a public heads-up challenge, and in November 2025 watched Half Yours — a racehorse he part-owns — win the Melbourne Cup for an A$4.5 million purse, a result he described as a childhood dream fulfilled. It was a fitting closing of the loop for the teenager who once bet on horses for fun.
What should poker fans watch for next? Two things: whether the long-teased Hellmuth heads-up match ever materialises, and whether Guoga’s sporadic high-roller and livestream appearances become anything more frequent. At 52, with his money made off the table, Tony G plays when he wants to — which means the next time he sits down, it will be because he has something to prove, not something to earn.
Frequently asked questions
Tony G has won $11,295,296 in live tournament earnings across 144 recorded cashes, according to The Hendon Mob (verified June 2026). That figure covers live tournaments only; it does not include his cash-game results or online play, which are private and unverifiable.
Tony G has zero WSOP bracelets. He has cashed at the World Series of Poker roughly 20 times for over $1.6 million, with a best finish of sixth, but has never won an open event for a bracelet — one of the more notable gaps in the résumé of a player this famous.
Tony G is a hyper-aggressive, psychologically driven player best known for using table talk and verbal provocation as strategic tools to tilt opponents. His game is intuition- and pressure-based rather than modern solver-driven, and it thrives most in loose, high-ego cash games and short-deck high-roller events.
Tony G was born Antanas Guoga in Kaunas, Lithuania, on 17 December 1973, and moved to Melbourne, Australia, at the age of 11. He holds both Lithuanian and Australian ties and is now based primarily in Lithuania.
Tony G still plays, but far less than at his peak. His last recorded tournament cash was in 2022, and most of his energy now goes into business, investments and livestreamed cash games rather than the tournament circuit.
Tony G is married to Lithuanian model Aistė Šlapokaitė. The couple have two sons, Herkus and Tauras, and Guoga has additional children from previous relationships, for a reported total of six.