Out of 2.6 billion No Limit Hold’em player-hands dealt on WPT Global, CoinPoker, GGPoker, PokerStars and WPN/ACR between September 2020 and September 2026, one name sits at the top of the cash-game leaderboard: huangyangliu, with $5.31 million won on WPT Global.
Here is how they did it.
More hands than anyone
huangyangliu played 702,743 hands, more than anyone else in the top 25. At $7.55 won per hand, it is easy to see why they kept going.
They played 817 days since April 2023, about 65% of all the days in that stretch.
The widget below draws from a bigger group than the top 25. The top 25 are the players who won the most money. This widget takes every player in the data who finished in profit, in all five rooms, and shows the top ten three ways:
- Win Rate: big blinds won per 100 hands (straddle-adjusted), for players with at least 50,000 hands.
- $ per Hand: dollars won per hand, with the same 50,000-hand minimum.
- Hands Played: total hands, with no minimum.
On the Hands Played tab, huangyangliu is fourth. The three players above them played more hands but won between $270,000 and $565,000 each, too little to make the top 25. Of the ten biggest grinders in the data, huangyangliu is the only one who also made the top 25 by winnings.
The biggest winner per hand was Markus Leikkonen from Finland, a high stakes regular recognised by many from his avatar SpongeBob Squarepants.
Real volume, with a real edge
Volume on its own does not get you to $5.31 million. huangyangliu’s straddle-adjusted win rate is 11.57 bb/100. Within the top 25, only three players with at least 50,000 hands have a higher rate: biglucky88, TyCobb7 and smallbear5, all on WPT Global. huangyangliu does not appear on the Win Rate tab above because that tab ranks every winner in the data, including players who won much less at a higher rate.
Their main game was ¥50/¥100/¥200 with the straddle (about $7/$14/$28), where they played nearly half their hands.
Consistency is key
Take away huangyangliu’s five best days and they would still top the leaderboard. Without them, they are left with $3.33 million, more than any other player’s full total (biglucky88 is second at $2.46 million).
Their best single day was $422,560, just 8% of the total. What sets them apart is how often the big days came: 43 days of $100,000 or more, over twice as many as anyone else in the top 25.
The widget below does the same test for everyone. Pick a room and it shows every player in that room’s top 25: their total, then what is left once their five best days are taken away. Every player in WPT Global’s top 25 stays in profit.
Mixing formats paid off
Only about a fifth of huangyangliu’s hands were heads-up, but they won $2.89 million there, on top of $2.42 million in ring games.
Heads-up matters more to the biggest winners than to everyone else. The widget below looks at each room’s top 25 as a group, not at any one player. Pick a room, then switch between hands and money:
- Hands: the share of the group’s hands that were heads-up, next to the share for every player in that room.
- Money: the share of the group’s winnings that came from heads-up.
On WPT Global, for example, the top 25 played 7.0% of their hands heads-up, against 2.2% for the room as a whole, and won 13.9% of their money there.
The rest of the top 25
biglucky88 is second at $2.46 million, also on WPT Global. Third is KayhanMok at $2.31 million on CoinPoker, home of the biggest public games in our data, where KayhanMok had the biggest single day on the whole leaderboard: $1,199,300 in 47 hands at $2,500/$5,000 on January 16, 2026.
The leaderboard below is the full top 25, ranked by total winnings after rake:
- All rooms: the 25 biggest winners across all five rooms, with huangyangliu at the top.
- Each room’s tab: that room’s own top 25.
Click a column header (Hands, bb/100 or HU %) to re-sort any tab.
See the full report
Every room’s leaderboard, win rates, heads-up splits and biggest days are in AceGuardian’s Industry Ecology Report, and the full write-up is on the QuintAce blog. If you want to see how your own decisions compare with solver strategy, QuintAce grades individual hands against a solver.
Net after rake, in USD; yuan converted at $0.14. Screen names are platform-local. WPT Global is an operator feed; the other rooms are purchased samples from $0.50/$1 up, with gaps. Full methodology.
