Nik Airball has come a long way since his humbling $1 million heads-up defeat to Matt Berkey in 2023.
The self-proclaimed “King of LA” has overtaken poker vlogger Mariano Grandoli as the winningest player in the history of Hustler Casino Live. Airball reached the top of the mountain by the slimmest margin earlier this week when he booked a $150,000 winning session.
On a Tear
According to HighRollPoker.com, Grandoli held the lead with a lifetime $3.325 million profit on Hustler Casino Live until Nik Airball, who wasn’t far behind, booked a six-figure winning session earlier in the week to surpass that lead by a small margin.
Things got even better for Airball on Friday night even though he wasn’t in the game. Grandoli had a brutal session and was the biggest loser in the game with a $305,000 loss. As such, he dropped to around $3 million in lifetime profits on the show, while Airball is now at around $3.4 million, according to a graphic that appeared during the Wednesday stream.
A couple poker fans didn’t want to give Airball his credit, as they claim that he’s only the leader because Garrett Adelstein, who has been banned from HCL since the “Jack-Four” saga, would easily hold the lead if he still played on the show. And that may very well be true. Adelstein is still ninth all-time on Hustler Casino Live with a $1.55 million profit, and he earned that in barely more than a year before accusing Robbi Jade Lew of cheating him out of a six-figure pot in Sept. 2022.
But with or without Adelstein on HCL, Nik Airball has dominated the game for quite some time after a rocky start when he first showed up to play in 2022. His profits could be even higher if not for a ban from Hustler Casino in 2024 that kept him on the sidelines for a year.
Airball has played over 1,300 hours of poker on Hustler Casino Live, trailing only “Mike X,” Francisco Fragoso, and former co-owner Nick Vertucci. Of the players who have played 300 or more hours on the Southern California show, Airball has one of the highest hourly wages at around $2,500 per hour. But no one in that group has won at a higher rate than Ethan “Rampage” Yau, who is making about $7,400 per hour.
As for the biggest loser in Hustler Casino Live history, the winner is Michael “Texas Mike” Moncek, who is down $4.38 million thanks to some brutal sessions in the Million Dollar Games.
Nik Airball Wins $1 Million in High-Stakes Poker Game
