Senior Editor U.S.
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Phil Ivey is often considered the poker G.O.A.T., a claim that’s tough to dispute given his success across the board playing online, live, in cash games, in tournaments, and dominating multiple poker variants.
But if there’s one minor blip on his poker resume, it appears to be in televised and livestreamed cash games. Data pulled from HighRollPoker.com, a site that tracks all TV and livestream games dating back to the 2000s, indicates a decline in results and appearances over the past decade.
Ivey’s History Playing Poker on TV
Ivey, second only to Phil Hellmuth with 11 World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets, first appeared in a televised cash game in 2006 on a Full Tilt TV production.
The Full Tilt Poker pro at the time would make his High Stakes Poker debut during Season 3 in 2007 on the Game Show Network. He’d become a regular on the iconic poker show, along with another popular show, Poker After Dark, which previously aired on NBC. More recently, he’s played multiple times on livestreams such as Hustler Casino Live and Triton Poker.
Ivey’s presence at the table during two Hustler Casino Live streams in October 2021 brought attention to the brand-new livestream. The show’s YouTube followers tripled immediately after that weekend. But Ivey didn’t have much success in those games, losing over $140,000 in 11 hours, and he seemed more focused on his sports bets than the poker game.
He competed in the 2015 Super High Roller Cash Game, which coincided with the Poker Central (now PokerGO) launch. The Poker Hall of Famer has also appeared in a World Poker Tour (WPT) cash game in December 2024, his most recent public cash game appearance.
What’s the Data Say?
Ivey has played dozens of memorable televised poker hands. He infamously lost a $677,000 pot on High Stakes Poker to a bluffing Tom Dwan, who fired out a $268,200 bet on the river with nine-high against a missed flush draw that turned into a small pair.
Despite the memorable hand against Dwan, Ivey has been quite successful on High Stakes Poker, accumulating a $471,900 profit across 37 hours of play, mostly during the 2000s on the Game Show Network before the show moved to PokerGO years later. He also won over $500,000 playing 101 hours on Full Tilt TV, and nearly $70,000 in 73 hours of Poker After Dark.
But his overall numbers aren’t so great, but they aren’t awful. He’s down $409,549 lifetime, which might seem like an insane amount of money to the average poker player. To Ivey, that’s just one average buy-in.
Ivey’s losses have come from Hustler Casino Live (-$387,000 in 24 hours), Super High Roller Cash Game (-$432,800 in 20 hours), Triton Poker (-$602,961 in 36.5 hours), and WPT Cash Game (-$57,000 in eight hours).
Ivey has played 299.50 hours of cash game poker in televised and livestreamed games. He’s losing $1,367 and 0.37 big blinds per hour. The poker legend peaked in January 2015 when he was up nearly $1 million lifetime. Since then, his graph has been on a downward trajectory.
That said, 300 hours of poker isn’t exactly a massive sample size. Ivey, arguably the best to ever play the game, is one monster pot away from getting out of the red.
Senior Editor U.S.