'We're slowly dying without new players' - Daniel Weinman plans to save poker

He had his year in the spotlight and a year to roll up his sleeves and go to work.

Daniel Weinman’s story is as improbable as it is incredible and at 37 years old, he’s ready to write a new chapter. He’s ready for his legacy to expand beyond being a World Series of Poker Main Event champion, ready to bring millions of new players into the game he lives and breathes.

Well before Weinman took center stage at the 2023 WSOP Main Event final table, he was already a legendary figure in gambling circles; in part because of creating “Fantasyland” for Open Face Chinese Poker and a scratch golfer that would play anybody wearing his endearing, ear-to-ear smile as he counted your money.

Weinman is one of the founders of RF Poker – a high-tech poker table company that’s poised to change the game. His win in 2023 coincided with the tech start-up and he was writing code between trips to Las Vegas.

RF Poker uses RFID (radio-frequency identification) cards and chips to facilitate the experience. Weinman met co-founders Maanit and Manish Madan in 2022. “Their goal was to have a poker tracker similar to online poker, but for an enhanced live table experience,” Weinman said.

Looking to change the game

“Gambling is kind of the number one barrier of entry that turns people away, and I probably sound hypocritical wanting to remove gambling from the game,” said Weinman. “Poker is such a great game and it's been played with money forever; gambling is part of it, but we’re looking at a Top Golf concept. We have a private room for your group, a professional dealer and an enhanced, social experience.”

“A reason we feel that poker is slowly dying is we’re not getting new players,” Weinman said. RF Poker helps bridge that gap with a professional dealer, sensors that display real-time chip counts and bet sizes and an interactive app that helps players grow their game.

The tables are sleek with separate sensors to read cards and chips, a lighting system that changes with the action and are completely customizable. They have a few in use in Texas and are actively showcasing their technology for major poker tours.

Writing a new chapter

Weinman followed the best year of his career with the best year of his personal life in 2024. Within months of winning life-changing money, he got married, bought a house and is expecting his first child in a few weeks.

“I've always had this feeling that I never wanted to play poker forever,” Weinman said. “I wanted to settle down, have a family and I always struggled with that while playing poker.”

“My home base was Atlanta, but I lived out of a suitcase,” said the Georgia Tech grad. “You know, I had relationships that failed mostly because I was always on the road. It’s hard to make time for a relationship if you're really in this world full time.”

“We got engaged, married and pregnant in 2024 – so that was a lot,” said Sarah Weinman. “Daniel stepped back from poker a little bit, which has been interesting for us to navigate. It’s been a fun ride and I try to be supportive.”

By any measure, she jumped into the deep end to the poker world without any idea of what to expect. “The first trip I did out there I walked into the big room and I saw so many butt cracks and half naked guys getting massages,” she laughed. “I was like, ‘Why would you want to be around this?’ But I have a different opinion now after being involved. This world is eye-opening.”

Daniel Weinman collected just nine tournament cashes in 2024 in a limited schedule. He focused on personal growth, his relationship and building his company.

Playing bar leagues

We caught up with Weinman on just the second game of poker he played in 2025 – a suburban Atlantan bar league. But we were seated at the most technologically advanced poker table in development, while we played for bar tab money.

Weinman saw Manit on Joe Ingram’s podcast after the Robbie Lew/Garret Addelstein controversy as a security expert. “He had been building security features for tables and had a prototype in his basement,” said Weinman. “It was a perfect fit because I was kind of getting out of playing poker full-time and do some sort of programming and what better than a poker company?”

“It didn’t really feel like work,” he said. “So many people, me included, got into poker because we didn’t want a boss or a 9-5 job. But ask anyone that’s been playing for a living, everything becomes a grind. You’re a slave to tournament schedules or when cash games run. The ultimate freedom you thought you once had, you don’t really have anymore.”

“So, it was the opposite for me, where I went from playing poker to a living to sitting at a desk writing code,” Weinman added. He’s completely at ease without playing competitive poker this year and the vibe wears him like a suit.

Daniel and Sarah played next to each other wearing goofy grins and one of poker’s finest pure players was getting check-raised by bar league regs eating wings at the table. Most players knew Weinman, but others had no idea because Weinman gets embarrassed by his notoriety and will never toot his own horn.

Of the three of us, Daniel was the first eliminated – he didn’t even make the first break. Sarah found pocket aces, shoved preflop and I moved in over the top with Ac Kc. There was a king on the flop, then runner-runner clubs and House Weinman’s chips became mine.

They shook hands with everybody, chatted about the league’s monthly leaderboard invitational event and tipped the server before they left. Calling on poker’s Main Event champion as an ambassador fell out of favor as some shunned the spotlight and others gave it the middle finger. But here was the champ, on a Tuesday night, playing free bar league poker, planting the seeds for another poker boom.

Team Lucky looking for an alternate?

“I think Team Lucky (Weinman, Shaun Deeb, Matt Glantz, Josh Arieh) is going to be without me this year,” he said. “I used to play the entire summer, Sarah and Shaun famously convinced me to return in 2023 to play the Main. I only played the opening and Main Events in 2024.”

Playing as the reigning Main Event champion didn’t stress him out. “I almost think it’s easier. People want the story when you’re playing against them, so they’re doing wild things, giving me wild calls and going for wild bluffs. I didn’t have to do anything special; my normal game became so much more profitable. I felt that I was getting called a lot more, so naturally, I stopped bluffing a lot.”

“We’re expecting at the end of June, so I think it’s going to be hard to play any tournaments,” Weinman said. “I’d love to go and play the Main, but I don’t think Sarah’s going to be too happy if she’s at home with an infant and I’m not.”

The formation of Team Lucky had a tremendous impact on all of their results. Weinman shipped the Main, Glantz pulled a $1 million bounty, Arieh and Deeb both won their sixth bracelet.

“It’s huge to have top-level players who see the game from a different perspective,” said Weinman. “We’re similar where we’re not chart guys – Glantz is playing a $2,000 average buy-in in Florida, Josh is playing PLO and Mixed Games and Shaun is playing everything under the sun.”

“We bounce ideas off each other to see what’s working and what’s changing in the game,” he said. “A fly on the wall would think we hate each other, think all other people suck and that’s just the nature of who we are – we like needling each other.”

“We give Josh the most crap because he’s a smart player, but does some things that are unexplainable,” Weinman added. “He has to be the luckiest player in the world to be where is, Shaun makes fun of us for what we’re doing, but he’s in for 15 bullets every tournament he plays.”

“From a pure poker perspective, what would one learn from the house? Not a ton,” he laughed. “But you’ll grow thick skin.”

No time for life while grinding

During his first decade in poker, Weinman threw himself into the game playing everything he could – tournaments and cash games. It was a formative time in his life that he looks back on with a grain of salt.

In the last couple of months, he’s found himself missing the game a little bit. He said, “The problem I had with poker and the reason I took a step back was that I was traveling to stops, spending all this money on hotels and within an orbit of sitting down, I’d be ready to be out.”

“So, if I'm this miserable playing poker, let's do something else for a while,” he said. “Occasionally, I find myself missing it a bit and think I want to go back because I know I can make a lot of money. I can continue that career, but I'm enjoying the other things more now.”

Weinman is leaning into the life of a professional man of leisure. He’s known for his golf game, he picked tennis back up recently and admitted his latest obsession is backgammon.

“I’ve always been a mind sport guy and chess feels too rigid for me,” he said. “I don’t like the idea that there’s no luck in chess. With backgammon, there’s a lot of similarities where there’s the perfect move, but at the same time it’s luck. Every individual game is luck but in the long run, the better player wins.”

The student becomes the teacher

Weinman didn’t study Hold’em charts, didn’t study GTO (game theory optimal) play and relied on his innate poker sense at the table. “I was never someone who worked really hard at poker, it came naturally to me,” he said. “I came up playing online in an era where you didn’t have to be very good to make money.”

“I think one of my biggest assets is that I’ve never had a big ego when it comes to poker,” said Weinman. “I don’t need to play the highest stakes; I don’t need to go battle at Triton events because I know those guys are better than me. If poker is your job, then you have to put yourself in good spots to win.”

Weinman is a lifetime learner from the game and when designing an efficient RFID streaming table, he wanted to fold in a teaching element into the game. A large part of RF Poker’s market is for inexperienced, social players and the app allows players to review their games with proprietary software.

“I think it can attract new players to the game,” he said. “We bring people in, track and analyze their play. It’s not from a GTO perspective, we’ll never show you a chart, but we’ll show you that this player was aggressive and maybe you should have called him more.”

“There are so many things to gamble on now – when I came up it was just poker. Now sports betting, daily fantasy, crypto lotteries are all out there and there’s no reason for someone to start playing poker now.

Giving players a reason to show up

Weinman pointed to Dustin Iannotti’s famous X post on the poker world. “It’s the same quarter million people that people are recycling,” he said. “If RF Poker’s market ends up just being poker players, then we’ve completely failed.”

Weinman got proof of concept when he had his wife invite all of her friends for a night out to play. Selfishly, he might hope to convert all these people into real money players but if he can get 10 million people that have never played poker before an experience they won’t forget, that plants a seed.

“One of my favorite parts about poker is when someone new comes first place or they get to show a bluff,” Weinman said. “Poker is 95% men and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be attracting women and younger people into the game. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”

Compare and contrast Weinman’s emotional rollercoaster during his Main Event coverage with that of 2024’s Jonathan Tamayo’s emotionless, solver-based win with a laptop on the rail.

“I don’t think I ever stood up besides running to my rail for all ins,” Weinman said of his final table. “The laptop on the rail was weird, but it showed where the direction poker is going. Here’s some guys playing for the most money ever and they’re looking at what a computer says to do rather than be in the moment.”

0-fer 2025

Weinman expects that 2025 will probably be a blank year on his Hendon Mob profile. Between his wife’s pregnancy, new home and new company, he’ll have plenty to do at home.

“When I was traveling and playing big, I couldn’t have imagined being a dad,” he said. “I didn’t want any extra responsibility, but now that I’ve taken a step back, I can play golf and tennis and play a couple of home games a week.”

“I never wanted to be the 60 or 70-year-old guy grinding in a casino to make a living,” Weinman said. “As much as I like poker, I never wanted it to be a job anywhere near as long as it ended up.”

“I think I’ve always wanted to be a dad,” said Weinman. “Sarah and I grew up here. Playing poker is not an important part of my life right now, not in the near future.”

Photos courtesy of 8131Media.