Jason Koon Named Sole 2026 Poker Hall of Fame Inductee
The revised voting system could have allowed multiple players in, but Koon was the only one chosen.
Jason Koon was named the sole inductee into the Poker Hall of Fame class of 2026, even though the Hall’s revised system had opened the door to multiple players getting in this year.
The announcement came during a break in WSOP Main Event final-table action, with Jeff Platt delivering the news.
Under the new process, the public helped narrow the field to eight finalists, and the 33 living Hall members each got four votes to split among them; any finalist clearing a two-thirds threshold would be inducted automatically, while the top vote-getter would take the lone spot if nobody got there.
He was third on poker’s All Time Money List with more than $77 million in career earnings, and close to $2 million of that came less than two months earlier when he won Event #32, the $50,000 High Roller, for his second WSOP bracelet.
His first bracelet came five years earlier in the $25,000 Heads-Up Championship. Between those WSOP wins, he served as an ambassador for PartyPoker and GGPoker, and he now plays as a PokerStars Team Pro, the site where he first played online poker.
Koon has also been a Triton Poker ambassador since 2019. He owns a record 12 Triton titles, five more than anyone else, and his biggest score came in the 2018 Triton Montenegro HK$1,000,000 Short Deck, where he won more than $3.5 million.
Last year, when asked about his chances of making the Hall, Koon told PokerNews he would “see what the people in there think.” He had turned 40 last August, which the Hall treats as the age prerequisite for nomination.
The 2026 finalist group also included five first-time nominees: Shaun Deeb, Isaac Haxton, Chris Moorman, Justin Bonomo and Koon. Among the holdovers, Isai Scheinberg missed out for the seventh time, Scott Seiver fell short for the second straight year after first becoming eligible in 2025, Ted Forrest had eight nominations, Matt Savage had 10, and Mike Matusow had 12 without induction since 2013.
The Hall itself dates to 1979, when Benny Binion created it to preserve the game’s biggest names and bring tourists to Las Vegas. Caesars Entertainment took over stewardship of the WSOP and the Hall in 2004, and the induction rules have shifted over time, from the old two-per-year pattern to a one-person rule in 2020 before this year’s broader ballot change.
