Jaime Staples’s Life: Net Worth, Biggest Profits, Losses and Private Life

Did you know that Jaime Staples once dreamed of becoming Tiger Woods before poker changed the direction of his life? Or that the Twitch star went from almost losing his entire bankroll to building a career as one of poker’s best-known streamers? And how did a $150,000 weight-loss bet with his brother Matt Staples eventually have consequences that went far beyond the money? Find the answers to these questions and more below.

Who Is Jaime Staples?

Jaime Staples is a Canadian professional poker player, Twitch streamer and content creator best known for his online poker career and the PokerStaples brand.

Born on May 27, 1991, Staples started out on a very different path from the one that eventually defined his career. As a teenager, his dream was not poker but golf. He played seriously and wanted to follow in the footsteps of Tiger Woods. By the end of high school, however, he realized that he was missing several things he needed to reach the level he was aiming for.

Staples turned to poker when he started playing Zynga Poker with his friends and became frustrated that his younger brother, Matt Staples, had more play-money chips than he did. That sibling rivalry provided the initial motivation for Jaime to start studying the game more seriously.

Poker offered Staples exactly what he felt golf could not. His physical attributes or his family’s financial resources did not determine how far he could go. He could start out in tournaments with buy-ins as low as $1 and simply try to make better decisions than his opponents.

What Is Jaime Staples’ Net Worth?

Jaime Staples’ exact net worth is not publicly known. Publicly available poker databases do not provide anything close to a complete picture. What we do know is that, according to The Hendon Mob, Staples has $175,947 in total live earnings and $1,625,352 in online tournament winnings. Poker results also represent only one part of his financial picture, as he has earned income from streaming, content creation and sponsorship deals throughout his career.

From Almost Going Broke to Professional Poker

Staples began calling himself a professional very early in his career. He was only 19 when, with a bankroll of around $2,500, he quit his job at a golf course and told his friends that he was now a professional poker player. Reality quickly caught up with him. His bankroll continued to shrink until he had almost nothing left, but even as he approached zero, he refused to give up and continued trying to make a living from poker.

Even in that situation, Staples subscribed to a poker training site, spent hours every day watching training videos and began rebuilding his bankroll from very low stakes. Living with his parents helped, as he had few financial obligations. One of his strongest motivations was also remarkably simple: he had already told everyone he was a professional poker player, and he did not want to come back having failed.

Staples later attended university while continuing to play poker, but he soon realized that despite the difficult start, becoming a professional poker player was what he wanted. Eventually, he dropped out of university to pursue poker full-time.

From Online Poker to Twitch

The turning point in Staples’ career was not a major tournament victory, but the discovery of Twitch. He first came across the idea of streaming poker on the Two Plus Two forum in October 2014, and shortly after getting started, he was already telling his friends that he was going to become a sponsored poker pro – even though he was still playing relatively low stakes at the time.

He took the idea seriously. During his first months as a streamer, Staples broadcast six days a week, often for eight or nine hours a day. Twitch allowed him not only to show his poker sessions to an audience, but also to build a community around them.

The growth came remarkably quickly. Just a year later, in 2015, PokerStars signed him. But the increased exposure also had a downside. Staples later recalled that early in his career, another streamer publicly called him a bad poker player, and the criticism affected him so deeply that he cried. Over time, however, criticism became part of the job. He was no longer simply a poker player, but a content creator whose decisions were watched and analyzed live by his audience.

PokerStars, partypoker and His Poker Career

Signing with PokerStars marked the first major breakthrough of Staples’ streaming career. He continued building the PokerStaples brand while devoting more and more of his time to content creation. After four years, however, he left PokerStars in 2019 and joined partypoker, where he saw greater creative freedom and more opportunities to have an impact on the online poker community.

His brother Matt Staples also became an important part of the story. Matt initially helped Jaime manage his workload while Jaime was streaming 45 to 50 hours a week, but eventually became a professional poker player and well-known Twitch streamer himself.

One of Staples’ most notable online results came in 2021, when he finished third in the WPT500 Online on partypoker for $74,227, setting a new personal record for an online tournament score at the time.

Streaming, however, remained at least as important to his career as his poker results. Staples became one of the best-known representatives of a generation in which the roles of professional poker player, streamer, content creator and sponsored ambassador increasingly began to overlap. In a 2024 interview, he said that at one point in his career, as many as 15,000 people were watching him play live at the same time.

The $150,000 Weight Loss Bet With Bill Perkins

One of Staples’ best-known stories, however, began not at the poker table but aboard Bill Perkins’ yacht . In early 2017, Perkins invited Jaime and Matt to the Virgin Islands to stream from his boat. At the time, the difference in weight between the two brothers was enormous: Jaime weighed a little over 300 pounds, while Matt weighed just 134.

A viewer suggested how crazy it would be if the brothers could one day weigh the same. That idea became the Ultimate Sweat. Perkins offered them 50:1 odds: the brothers put up $3,000 for the chance to win $150,000 if their body weights were within one pound of each other exactly one year later.

How Jaime and Matt Staples Won the Ultimate Sweat

For Jaime, the challenge required dramatic weight loss. He followed a diet of around 1,250 calories per day and did several hours of low-intensity cardio.

One year later, on March 25, 2018, it was time for the weigh-in. Jaime weighed 188.3 pounds. Matt, meanwhile, had gained weight and built muscle, and also stepped onto the scale at exactly 188.3 pounds. Jaime had lost around 115 pounds, and the brothers won the $150,000 bet, with Jaime’s share of the prize coming to $75,000.

The story attracted widespread attention, and Staples viewed it at the time as one of the greatest achievements of his life. The brothers then made another bet with Perkins, this time risking $50,000 to win $150,000 if they could both reduce their body fat percentage to below 10%. The second challenge, however, was unsuccessful.

Over the following years, Staples began to view the Ultimate Sweat very differently. His struggles with weight and food became more severe, he fluctuated between strict restriction and overeating, and he regained a significant portion of the weight he had lost.

Following a health incident during the PokerStars Players Championship in 2019, Staples became increasingly afraid of different foods, and his diet gradually narrowed to just a handful of items. He was later diagnosed with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) at a treatment center specializing in eating disorders in Montreal.

Staples does not claim that the Ultimate Sweat itself caused his eating disorder. He has, however, said that he regrets making the bet and now looks very differently at something he once considered one of his proudest achievements. In October 2023, he publicly opened up about his experience in a video.

The problem also affected his poker career, making travel and participation in live tournaments significantly more difficult for a period of time. He continued streaming, however, while gradually working on his recovery with the help of professionals.

Is Jaime Staples Still Playing Poker?

Yes. Jaime Staples remains an active poker player and streamer in 2026. He is still listed as a member of the team on partypoker’s current Team page under the screen name `jaimestaples`, with the PokerStaples Twitch channel also listed as his official streaming channel.

Staples has also returned to live poker and regularly played partypoker Tour stops in 2026. He recorded several cashes in Sheffield, including a victory in a £125+25 Turbo event, and added further results at several European stops during the year.