Brandon Adams’s Life: Biggest Profits, Losses, Private Life & Net Worth

– General Information –

Brandon Adams is an American professional poker player and author. He was born on December 12th, 1978 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has also taught game theory and behavioral finance lectures at Harvard University.

Adams has mainly played live cash games in his poker career. He played live cash on such classic poker shows as Poker After Dark on NBC and High Stakes Poker on The Game Show Network.

He’s seen great success on the live tournament scene as well. Overall, he has over $5.2 million in career winnings.

He also has a WSOP gold bracelet that he won in an online event. 

– Key Career Dates –

• 2003: He starts playing online cash games for recreation while studying at university.
• 2007: He decides to play live cash games for a living.
• 2009: He appears on the classic poker TV show Poker After Dark on NBC.
• 2017: He wins the $50,000 No Limit Hold’em event at the Poker Masters for $819,000. That is his biggest single live tournament cash to date.
• 2019: He wins his first WSOP gold bracelet. He finishes first in the $3,200 No Limit Hold’em Online High Roller event for $411,561.

– Brandon Adams’s Career –

 → Beginnings ←

Adams has always performed exceptionally at school. So much so that he even graduated from the University of Florida at just aged 19. He was studying economics. The young scholar went on to do his Master’s degree at UFL, then went to Harvard to do his doctorate. 

It was in his early college years when he had his first encounter with the game of poker.

He recalled his introduction to the game as such on an episode of the Poker Stories Podcast for cardplayer.com:

“When I was taking game theory at University of Florida, poker was a very common topic of conversation. (…) So I had an early academic fascination with the game, to the extent that I was picking up some books and reading about poker. 

And then I was dating a girl who suggested one time we go to Biloxi and just have a ‘weekend chill’. And we went, we had a really good time. And the best thing we did was play poker at the poker room. (…)

Then when I got to Harvard, there was a poker club. And the guys took it very seriously. (…) That group would meet once a week to talk about theory and they would also meet once a week to play poker.”

Adams got into online poker at the best time possible, the very beginning of the Moneymaker boom around 2003. Since then he was involved in poker to varying extents while studying on scholarships.

He decided to take his poker career to the next level in the summer of 2007. He noticed that the live cash game action in Las Vegas had been particularly good for some time then – soft and plentiful games. So he made playing cards the main focus of his professional life.

→ Live Tournaments ←

Adams has always been mainly a live cash game player. However, he still racked up an impressive $5.2 million in live tournament earnings as well. He made ITM finishes in 46 different live events.

The first recorded cash on his Hendon profile is from May 2005. He finished 21st in a $10,000 WSOP Circuit event for $14,765 in his hometown of New Orleans, LA. The first time he made a 6-figure cash was also in a $10K WSOPC tourney. He came in 6th for $114,475 in Tunica, MS in January 2006.

Adams started regularly playing high rollers in 2017.

In January 2017, he had a runner-up finish in the A$25,000 Challenge tournament for A$590,520 at the Aussie Millions. In the same year, he took 3rd place in the $25,500 High Roller for $351,000 at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open.

Also in 2017, in September, he took down one of the $50K events at the inaugural Poker Masters for $819,000. That is the biggest single live tournament score of his career to date.

In April 2018, he won the $25,500 High Roller for $370,000 at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open, the event he took 3rd place in a year before. In September 2018, he took down a $25K Poker Masters event for $400,000.

Thank you @HardRockHolly @shrpo @TDTonyB pic.twitter.com/syyltOxJxA

— Brandon Adams (@badams78) April 17, 2018

→ World Series Of Poker ←

Adams has won one WSOP gold bracelet so far. He won the $3,200 WSOP.com Online High Roller event for $411,561 in 2019. The World Series has been running online bracelet events on their own poker client since 2015.

Aside from his bracelet, Adams has cashed in 20 other WSOP tournaments. He has a total of $2.395 million in World Series of Poker winnings.

In 2019, he came in 5th in the $100,000 No Limit Hold’em High Roller event for $611,258. That was his biggest WSOP payday. Also in 2019, he finished 5th in the $50,000 Final Fifty NLHE tournament for $500,282. 2019 was by far the most successful World Series for him.

He also has a 2nd place finish for $243,958 in the $10K 7-Card Stud championship from 2010. He lost the heads-up battle for the title to Men “the Master” Nguyen.

Adams has 3 ITM finishes in the most prestigious poker tournament of all, the WSOP Main Event – he managed to make it in the money in 2007, 2015 and 2016. His best result is from 2007, when he finished 69th out of 6,359 entrants and won $130,288.

→ Live Cash Games ←

As we mentioned earlier, live cash games have always been the focus of Adams’ poker career. In fact, playing cash at the Bellagio during the time of the 2007 WSOP was where he decided to go professional. 

He played live cash in front of cameras on a number of poker shows. He’s appeared on such classics as Poker After Dark on NBC or High Stakes Poker on The Game Show Network. On those shows, he played against such poker greats as Phil Hellmuth, Tom Dwan and Antonio Esfandiari.

In 2007, Adams took on 2003 WSOP Main Event runner-up finisher Sammy Farha in a high stakes PLO heads-up challenge. Farha challenged anyone to a $300/$600 Pot Limit Omaha match in which he would give his opponent the position on the button in every hand. Adams accepted the generous offer, and ended up beating Farha out of $700,000.

→ Online Poker ←

As we mentioned earlier, Adams got into online poker at the beginning of the Moneymaker boom, around 2003.

He’s been playing mostly cash games from the very start. On the now defunct poker site Full Tilt, he played under his real name, Brandon Adams.

The online cash game database has 29,195 hands tracked on that account. Those hands were played between August 2007 and March 2011. In that sample, he lost $1.378 million, playing mostly $200/$400 Pot Limit Omaha.

HSDB also has some statistics on another Full Tilt account, “wins_pot”. Although the site lists the player behind that as “unknown”, “wins_pot” is the username Adams uses on the famous Two Plus Two Forums. Thus it is very likely it’s also him. While playing under that screen name, he lost an additional $327,214 over the course of 14,175 hands.

In addition to his cash game results, as we wrote above, Adams won his only WSOP gold bracelet in an online event.

In July 2021, Adams took on Phil Galfond in a $100/$200 heads-up PLO online cash game challenge. The match-up is set to last until a combined 40 hours is played, and there’s $150K laid on a side bet on Galfond’s part, and $100K on Adams’s part.

→ Sponsorships ←

Adams is a jack of many trades.

In 2008, the iUniverse publishing company released his fiction book with the title “Broke: A Poker Novel”. He’s also given lectures at Harvard University. 

As a poker player, he was part of the Full Tilt Red Pro team. They were sponsored players on the late site who got 100% rakeback as well as an hourly wage to play.