Twenty-one wins puts Lee Ugarte second on the all-time list, but the number that separates him is 9 Eight Deuce wins — more than anyone else has managed. Add 240 knockouts, second all-time, and $8,476 in career prize money, and you have a player who has been dangerous in three different decades.

It started early. June 2009, Canterberry #11, the tenth tournament he ever played, and he closed it out in two hours and fifty-six minutes — still the fastest anyone has finished a regular-season tournament, seventeen years later.

Then came 2022, the best season of his career. Four wins — #14, #16, #18 and #19 — and the Player of the Year title by a hundred and twelve points over Paul Coffman. It was not close at any stage.

He already had a trophy by then: the Annual in 2014, nineteen runners, nearly ten hours of poker, four knockouts and the last chip on the table. In December 2024 he added the Tournament of Champions — eight qualifiers, one table, $575 in prize money for first, the biggest single payday of his career.

Three trophies, no two of them alike. Twenty-nine trips to heads-up and he has won 21 of them. Get Lee one-on-one and you are a seven-to-three underdog before a card comes off the deck.

What holds the whole career together is that he never disappears. His longest wait between wins in nineteen years is twenty-three months, and he has won a tournament in twelve different calendar years — only one player has managed more. The fields change, the league changes names around him, and Lee keeps taking tournaments down.