Jason Somerville’s Life: Net Worth, Poker Career, WSOP & Run It Up

Did you know that Jason Somerville had little interest in gambling until a World Poker Tour broadcast changed the direction of his life at the age of 17? Or that, according to his own account, he built a six-figure bankroll from freeroll winnings without making an initial deposit? And how did the WSOP bracelet winner known online as JCarver become one of the early pioneers of poker streaming and build the Run It Up brand? Find the answers to these questions and more below.

Jason Somerville is an American professional poker player, streamer, and content creator best known online as JCarver. He has $3,886,374 in recorded live tournament earnings, won a WSOP gold bracelet in 2011, and later became one of the early prominent figures in online poker streaming.

Somerville’s story, however, began long before he ever sat down at a poker table. As a teenager, he was far more interested in sports, particularly karate, and he later credited martial arts with shaping the work ethic he would bring to poker.

Jason Somerville’s Early Life and Introduction to Poker

Jason Somerville was born on April 15, 1987, on Long Island, New York. As a teenager, gambling held little appeal for him. Karate was a much bigger part of his life. Martial arts taught Somerville to give his full effort to whatever he was doing. He started at the bottom of the karate school, mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, and taking on whatever work was necessary simply to get his foot in the door.

That mindset became particularly important when he discovered poker almost by accident at the age of 17.
One day, Somerville came home from his karate teaching job and found his father watching the World Poker Tour on television. He had never gambled before and knew very little about poker, but the game immediately caught his attention.

Somerville watched Howard Lederer win the televised tournament and was fascinated by the composure and confidence with which he played. By the end of the broadcast, Somerville had decided that he wanted to try the game himself.

After discovering the game, he began playing home games with friends and studying poker strategy online. In his account of his early poker career, Somerville also described entering freerolls on Pacific Poker and trying to build a bankroll without making an initial deposit.

According to Somerville, his freeroll winnings eventually gave him a bankroll of around $500, which he used to play $0.50/$1 cash games and low-stakes Sit & Go tournaments. He said he later grew that bankroll into six figures without making an initial deposit. This account describes his individual experience rather than a recommended bankroll-management approach or an indication of what other players can expect to achieve.
By the time he turned 21, Somerville was already playing poker professionally and was old enough to compete
regularly in World Series of Poker events.

Jason Somerville’s Poker Career and Net Worth

Jason Somerville’s exact net worth is not publicly known. His recorded live tournament earnings should not be confused with either poker profit or personal net worth: tournament cashes do not deduct buy-ins, account for staking arrangements, or reflect taxes and other expenses.

His career has also included online poker, sponsorship partnerships, streaming, content production, and projects under the Run It Up brand. Those activities cannot be used to calculate his personal wealth without reliable information about their financial results and his interests in them. Public tournament records alone therefore do not support a reliable estimate of his net worth.

Somerville’s earliest recorded live tournament results date back to 2005. One of his first cashes came at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino, where he finished 14th in a $200 tournament for $451.

Two years later, he recorded a much larger result. In 2007, Somerville finished second in a $1,000 Heartland Poker Tour event for $30,702, his first recorded live tournament cash worth more than $10,000. By 2009, Somerville was competing regularly on major international poker tours. He finished 19th in a €10,000 European Poker Tour event in Monte Carlo for €52,000 and later that year recorded his first six-figure live tournament cash at the WSOP.

His major breakthrough came in 2011. Somerville won the $1,000 No-Limit Hold’em event at the World Series of Poker, defeating a field of 3,175 players to capture his first WSOP gold bracelet and a $493,091 first prize.
The victory arrived during a period in which Somerville was also beginning to reconsider what success meant to him beyond money and poker results.

He continued to produce notable tournament finishes in the years that followed. Somerville made a deep run in the 2012 WSOP Main Event, finishing 69th, and returned to the money in the Main Event in 2024 with a 566th-place finish.

His biggest recorded live tournament cash, however, came outside the WSOP. In June 2014, Somerville entered the $100,000 Super High Roller at the Bellagio. He finished fourth in the 66-entry field and earned $1,327,352, which remains the largest live tournament cash of his career.

According to The Hendon Mob, Somerville has $3,886,374 in recorded live tournament earnings, with the $1,327,352 Bellagio result listed as his best live cash.

Personal Life and Coming Out

One of the most important personal turning points in Somerville’s life came around the same period in which his poker career was becoming increasingly successful. In 2012, Somerville publicly came out as gay. He said he had known for years that he was not straight but had never spoken openly about it until his early twenties.

During his teens and early twenties, Somerville dated women exclusively while trying to convince himself that his feelings were something he could ignore, grow out of, or simply avoid confronting.

At 22, he first came out to a close friend. He later told his parents, something he described as one of the hardest things he had ever done. For some time afterward, only a small number of people knew. By the age of 24, however, Somerville’s attitude had begun to change. He was becoming less focused solely on making money and increasingly concerned with his own happiness.

Somerville gradually became more open with the people around him, began dating, and said he increasingly stopped censoring his thoughts, desires, and feelings.

He described those changes as a series of small personal “victories” that eventually built momentum. By the time he publicly shared his story, Somerville said he was fully open in his personal life, was in a relationship, and felt happier than he ever had before.

Jason Somerville’s Online Poker Career

Somerville’s online poker career became closely associated with the name JCarver. His best-known PokerStars screen name was Jcarverpoker, a name inspired not by poker but by Jack Carver, the protagonist of the video game Far Cry.

Somerville had previously played on PokerStars under another account, Taknapotin. That account was later closed, meaning its results are not fully represented in the online tournament databases still available today.
The same applies to his early activity on Pacific Poker. As a result, the publicly tracked online results show only part of Somerville’s overall online poker career.

Older PocketFives records listed more than $346,000 in online MTT cashes on his Jcarverpoker account. This historical figure covers tracked tournament payouts on that account, not his total online poker earnings or profit.
One of the earliest recorded results was a modest $60 for a 97th-place finish in an $11 tournament. About a week later, however, he finished fifth in a $1,050 PokerStars event for $30,745, which was listed as his largest recorded individual online tournament score on that account.

Somerville also played online cash games, although much of the play he streamed came at lower and mid stakes.
Older high-stakes tracking data covered only around 2,500 hands on his JCarver account and showed a loss of $3,718 across those tracked hands. This limited sample is not a complete record of his cash-game play and does not establish his long-term results.

From JCarver to Poker Streaming

Somerville’s online presence eventually became more important than the results he was posting at the virtual tables. Even before Twitch became central to his career, he was creating poker strategy videos, including content for the now-defunct PokerTV. Streaming gave him a different way to present poker.

Instead of producing only edited strategy videos, Somerville could play live while explaining what he was seeing at the table, what options he was considering, and why he was making a particular decision. Viewers were therefore not simply watching a professional poker player compete. They were able to follow his thought process in real time. That combination of high-level poker strategy and entertainment became one of the defining features of the JCarver content.

Somerville later moved to Canada, where he could continue playing online poker, and increasingly focused on Twitch. He became one of the early prominent poker players to build a major audience through live streaming.

Run It Up

The Run It Up project grew out of Somerville’s approach to poker content. He initially launched the Run It Up bankroll challenge concept through videos in 2013 before bringing the series to Twitch in 2014. The channel grew quickly. By 2015, Run It Up had already passed 100,000 Twitch followers and accumulated millions of views.

The project also expanded beyond Somerville’s own streams. Other poker personalities appeared under the Run It Up banner, past poker events were streamed, and the community developed an identity of its own, with fans often referred to as the Run It Up Legion.

In 2015, the brand moved beyond online streaming with the launch of Run It Up Reno, a live poker festival that combined tournaments, seminars, and streamed content. Somerville continued to expand the project in the years that followed. In 2018, he launched Run It Up Studios in Las Vegas, a content-production project focused on poker streaming and creators.

The Run It Up Twitch channel remains online and has around 219,300 followers as of September 2026, although its most recent archived video dates back several years.

Run It Up marked an important shift in Somerville’s career. He was no longer simply a successful professional poker player creating content around his own game. He had turned that content into a community, a live-event series, and a broader poker media brand.

Jason Somerville’s Poker Sponsorships

Somerville’s growing online profile also attracted the attention of major poker operators.
In 2013, he joined Ultimate Poker as a sponsored professional. The site itself was short-lived and ceased operations in late 2014. In February 2015, Somerville joined Team PokerStars Pro.

The partnership fit naturally with the JCarver and Run It Up era of his career, as Somerville was already reaching a growing audience through streaming and poker content in addition to his tournament results.

Somerville is no longer a member of Team PokerStars, but his time with the company coincided with the period in which Run It Up and poker streaming became central parts of his career.