Cary Katz
American poker player Cary Katz founded a high-stakes poker game, PokerGO, and WSOP tournaments. He is an avid poker player and competes against high rollers. He has earned an amazing $39,806,157 in live tournament winnings, which places him 9th on the all-time money list.
This article will go over more of his poker achievements and life before becoming a poker player.
Cary Katz: Early Life
Little is known about Katz’s early life other than the fact that his grandmother taught him how to play poker. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Georgia.
Cary Katz founded Poker Central and the College Loan Corporation in 1999. He served as CEO for 15 years, becoming the seventh-largest student loan company in the US. He is also the creator of the “Triple Crown” of US high-roller tournaments. Which includes the Super High Roller Bowl, Poker Masters, and US Poker Open. He also founded the pop poker destination for tournaments, cash games, and lifestyle called Poker Central/PokerGO.
Cary Katz: Poker Career
Katz began his poker career in 2004 with a $10,381 prize at the Festa al Lago II in Las Vegas. It is known that he was already a multimillionaire by then, so it’s unlikely he was grinding smaller tournaments. He consistently finished in the five figures for years, including the 2009 WSOP Main Event, where he won $40,288.In 2013, he won his first six-figure PCA Super High Roller event, earning $543,800.
He also achieved six-figure wins in the 2013 WSOP, including second place in the $5,000 Pot Limit Hold’em for $138,794. In 2014, he had back-to-back wins at Bellagio High Roller II and III, and his first seven-figure score in July at The Big One for One Drop. His poker reputation and earnings led him to create Poker Central.
With the support of Daniel Negreanu, Antonio Esfandiari, and Phil Hellmuth, Katz launched Poker Central in 2015. It aired original shows and broadcasts of tournaments as the first poker channel on traditional cable TV. The project, however, was a failure and was shut down after only 14 months.
Katz changed the cable channel into PokerGO, the Netflix of the poker world, a paid subscription-based on-demand streaming service. In addition to live coverage of events like the World Poker Tour and WSOP, the channel now offers a video archive of classics like Poker After Dark and WSOP main event broadcasts.
He has then achieved seven seven-figure scores since 2014, including a fifth-place finish at the WSOP 2016 Monte Carlo €1,000,000 No Limit Hold’em Big One For One Drop, a $1,492,340 win at the Bahamas $100,000 #1 No Limit Hold’em Super High Roller event in 2018, and a second-place finish at the HK$ 1,000,000 No Limit Hold’em Short Deck Ante-Only in the Triton Poker Super High Roller Series.
Katz won the 2018 Aussie Millions Poker Championship for $1,074,908. He also placed fourth at the Triton Poker Super High Roller Series, earning $2,085,096. In 2021, he won $1,058,000 at the $100,000 No Limit Hold’em PokerGO Cup #8 of the PokerGO Tour.
He was still competing in tournaments up until this point, including the Triton Series, where he recently participated in the high roller triumph in 2023 and finished only 13th while winning $114,500. He is still making a big impression across different tournaments, and nobody knows when he will slow down.
Conclusion
It would be an understatement and a contradiction to say that Cary Katz enjoys being in the spotlight. On the one hand, he is incredibly modest, quiet as a mouse, and understated in both his actions and his words, and he avoids the camera and the microphone as much as possible.
Cary Katz is a fierce player at the poker tables, and as a result of his success in tournaments, he has earned more than $39 million in his career.
