Brandon Wilson No Longer High Stakes Poker’s Best Kept Secret

If you’re tapped into the Florida poker scene in any way, there’s a name that keeps popping up in high roller events. Over the course of the last two years, one player has taken down four separate high roller events at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood – two $25Ks, and two $50Ks – raking in millions despite being less than four years into his live tournament career.

It had a lot of people in poker asking themselves the same question. Who the heck is Brandon Wilson, and where did he come from?

The depth of that curiosity certainly increased this week as Wilson introduced himself to an even broader audience as he stepped into the PokerGO Studio and rattled off back-to-back wins in the PGT Last Chance series. Not only did he bank over $585,000 by beating out some of the most talented poker players in the world, Wilson also locked up a spot in the upcoming $1 million PGT Championship freeroll that starts on Friday despite zero other cashes in the studio in 2024.

It’s the latest peak for Wilson who is on a journey that’s taken him all over the world and down a number of different paths that, from the outside, don’t necessarily seem like the stereotypical equation for crafting a high-stakes crusher of Wilson’s caliber.

Wilson moved to Chicago with his mom when he was seven years old and has been based there ever since. He attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, one of the most prestigious institutions in that field, and even earned himself an internship with Al Jazeera in Qatar where Wilson covered sports and did English voiceover work.

After graduating from Northwestern, Wilson continued down the pathway toward a journalism career, but after a couple of years on that track, Wilson ran into the same wall that many did in early 2020.

“I worked in journalism for a while, and I also worked as a writer at a staffing firm in Chicago,” said Wilson. “That was right before COVID hit.”

That’s the moment when poker entered the picture for Wilson, who found himself stuck at home without much to do. Poker had always been a small part of his life, but it was about to get much bigger.

“I mean, if you go back 20 years we were playing for pennies in the lunchroom with friends, things like that,” said Wilson. “But really, when it started was during COVID. I went to college, had a job, and then I found myself with quite a bit of time on my hands during lockdowns and kind of missed poker and was always a fan from afar. I watched a lot of WSOP and all those kinds of things.”

From the solitude of his home, Wilson built his game and his bankroll from the ground up. While he simultaneously dedicated 200 hours towards yoga, and taught yoga classes on Zoom, Wilson’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge in poker helped to push him forward as he reached a near-obsessive level of commitment to learning.

“I honestly just started by firing up some small stakes online tables with the little bit of money that I could deposit,” said Wilson. “I guess the moment I’ll really kind of never forget was when I finished a session and I had written down on notepad on the computer, all these questions I had about, like, how do I play this hand differently? Or what could I have done? It’d be pretty cool if there was a machine I could ask.

“Back then, I didn’t know what a solver was,” said Wilson. “But I did a little bit of research and the only one I could afford at the time was GTO+. I don’t know what the price was, but PioSOLVER was way more expensive. I lived in GTO+ for a year and just continued playing every day, writing down my questions, and eventually, I found my coach when I cold DM’d him and told him that I was hungry, and that’s when things really took off.”

By 2021, Wilson was writing and creating content for DTO Poker, the coaching app launched by WPT Champions Club member Dominik Nitsche and Markus Prinz. After building himself up in the online poker world Wilson was ready to make the leap into the live poker world – and he wasn’t going to do it halfway.

His first ever recorded live cash came at WPT Venetian, a $5,000 buy-in event during the summer of 2021. Wilson largely kept his poker playing to Las Vegas and South Florida, with the occasional local event in the Chicago area. The range of buy-ins varied wildly, but Wilson was eager to mix it up and test himself against the high-roller players right off the bat.

“In the beginning, the level of comfort, you have to fake a little bit, or at least try,” said Wilson. “You’re definitely nervous. You come in somewhere like [the PokerGO Studio], nobody knows who the hell you are, and you’re playing with legends sort of across the board – people who have been doing it for a long time, people that you’ve watched. It can be intimidating in the beginning to develop confidence in that sort of scenario, but you really just have to play well and know that you’re playing well, even if results aren’t coming right away.”

The first live level-up for Wilson came almost two years ago – also in the PokerGO Studio – when he earned his first two six-figure live cashes with a pair of third-place finishes during the U.S. Poker Open in March 2023.

Wilson’s absurd stretch at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood started a few months later, as he won high roller titles in August 2023, and then in April, August, and December last year. He also made his first career WSOP final table in June – a $25,000 high roller, which should come as little surprise.

No one racks up over $3.8 million in live earnings in poker quietly, but Wilson had seemingly done so with as little fanfare as could be managed in that pursuit. Back-to-back victories streamed on PokerGO have shed significant light on Wilson, and to be clear, Wilson didn’t set out to be poker’s best-kept high-roller secret. From his results and his poise under the bright lights, Wilson appears ready to place himself into the thick of poker’s high-roller scene for years to come.

“When results start to trickle in, confidence is sort of natural,” said Wilson. “People, of course, start to look at you differently. It’s kind of funny winning tournaments as a poker player, because you really just play hand after hand, and sometimes things go your way by multiples. And so when you’re taking it in from the bird’s eye view, it’s pretty cool, because now there’s what you would call a resume. But in the thick of it, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, how sick would it be to win three in a row in Florida, or even back-to-back on PokerGO.

“It’s just a hand-by-hand thing, and when you look back, it is incredibly cool. It’s quite a surreal feeling, all the good vibes you get from people who support you, it’s awesome.”