A casino owner with a colorful personality. That’s how Eric Persson was first introduced to most of us, on a televised World Poker Tour show in 2022.
He sat there with Seth Davies, soon-to-confess cheater Ali Imsirovic, and almost immediately got the table to play the seven-deuce game.
Eric bought in for over $600,000, covering the entire table. In the first hand we see, the casino owner flops trips. We immediately get to see the kind of player he is, betting $4,000 blind before the turn, then $20,000 blind before the river, chatting casually the entire time.
For his entire time in the limelight, nothing about Eric Persson’s approach changed. If anything, it only became enhanced.
At the peak of his poker fame, he was battling the best, facing Daniel Negreanu, value betting Phil Ivey, and getting deep under the skin of Phil Hellmuth. He’s a bit like Will Kassouf, only much larger, slightly less hated, surely worse at the game, and with an affinity for exercise clothing.
Let’s go through Eric Persson’s story: Playing the role of a cash game bully, the casino ownership, and bankruptcy that followed.
Eric Persson’s Backstory: Table Games to Casino Owner
In Hoquiam, Washington in 1975, Eric Persson came into this world. He was raised near the Shoalwater Bay Indian Nation, and is also a member of the tribe.
Eric Persson apparently had his sights set on a gaming career from the first grade.
Despite his rough-around-the-edges persona, this is an educated man. Persson holds a combined degree in sociology, criminal justice, psychology, and communications, as well as a law degree. Surprisingly, he says both degrees were bankrolled from his poker winnings.
Of course, that’s not confirmed, and such statements will make many poker players think of Dan Bilzerian’s come-up story. If you know, you know.
Read ReadAfter his studies wrapped up in 2001, Eric immediately began climbing his way up the casino’s corporate ladder.
Apparently, he kicked off his career under the leadership of Michael Gaughan, a casino veteran in Vegas. He also worked at Harrah’s Las Vegas.
From there, he bounced around from operator to operator, moving ever higher.
- March 2001 – Director of Table Games – Prairie Band Casino & Resort
- April 2003 – Sr VP and Assistant General Manager – Wheeling Island Casino
- May 2005 – President of Tioga Downs and Vernon Downs – Nevada Gold & Casinos
- 2007 – Corporate Senior VP Of Slot Operations and Marketing – LV Sands Corp
- 2017 – GM, then President and COO – Aruze Gaming
Source: Eric Persson’s LinkedIn
In 2017, the Maverick Gaming era of Eric’s life began, a company he named after his son.
He started by picking up the Red Garter Casino in Nevada with Justin Beltram, an executive Eric worked beside at Las Vegas Sands. In 2026, Eric claims to own 26 different properties under the Maverick Gaming brand.
Global Gaming Business Magazine said Eric had the attributes of “a hard-charging, acquisition-minded empire builder.”
If we ended the story right here, it sounds like a nice upswing. Things go south later on, but it’s time to get into the poker part of this tale.
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Eric’s Becomes One of Poker’s Most Well-Known Names
Remember what Global Gaming Business Magazine called Eric? Well, it doesn’t just apply to his casino entrepreneurship. At the poker table, Eric is known for never holding back, playing fearlessly, and being a bit of a modern Tony G.
His time in front of the cameras started in 2021, with the first episodes airing in 2022.
Since then, he's played on Live at the Bike, Hustlers Casino, No Game No Future, High Stakes Poker, and Bally Live.
Thanks to Eric’s bold playing style, we’ve seen some absolutely massive pots:
In 2023, he played the largest pot in US televised poker history. That record’s been broken now, but $1,978,000 is still rare to see. It’s even more rare to see one player drawing dead before stacks go in for a pot this big.
But what draws us to Eric is not his massive pots – it’s his table talk. Sometimes, its funny. Other times, it gets close to (or crosses) the line.
“I don’t have good sportsmanship. I’m here for all of it.”
It doesn’t always matter who the recipient of his trash talk is.
His most high-profile clash was with Phill Hellmuth, who got several jabs from Eric after the WSOP-goat bought in for $10,000 in a $100/$200 game. This one even had Garrett Adelstein laughing.
But Eric has said publicly that this TV poker is to help market Maverick Gaming.
Sometimes, it goes right! In his match with Daniel Negreanu, Eric table-talked his way into getting Kid Poker to fold a strong hand.
But don’t start thinking Eric has been successful in this sport.
To date, he’s lost over $6,000,000 on televised games alone. Hopefully, he’s not playing private games with the same results (but he probably is). Eric’s losses could be far, far more than what is publicly available.
Since February 2024, there are no recorded results for Eric Persson.
Perhaps it was the $6,000,000 in losses that stopped him from playing. Perhaps it was the fact that his casino businesses were starting to fail.
The Maverick Gaming Bankruptcy
Even with investors, it appears that Maverick Gaming was following a debt-first profit-later approach to acquiring casinos. Market dominance came at a huge cost, and Maverick Gaming (RunItOneTime LLC) appears unable to cover that cost any longer.
When it filed for bankruptcy, it owed $305 million on its main loan.
In a 2025 filing, the brand appeared to own:
- 4 casinos in Northern Nevada
- 3 casinos in Colorado
- 17 cardrooms in Washington
- 1 casino fabrication business
Maverick Gaming also sold land under four casinos, then was seemingly unable to pay the rent on the land after leasing it back after the same. That cost $17.8 million a year, and Maverick was behind.
According to a June 2024 S&P Global Ratings report, it was stated that tech-industry layoffs had also hurt Maverick Gaming’s profits. Pair that with high rent, and it’s a recipe for a slow bleed.
In a very ironic twist, Persson’s own tribe, the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, helped hurt his casino businesses even more. He lobbied Washington lawmakers in 2020 and 2021 to try to get sports betting legalized inside cardrooms.
The case was thrown out, and an appeal failed. Persson’s tribe argued that they could not legally be sued in the matter, and Eric came out empty-handed. The Native American Rights Fund called it “a significant victory for Tribal sovereignty.” Eric probably would have called it millions and millions in potential profits up in smoke.
The company Eric built was broken up into pieces, bringing $119 million to the people his brand owed.
- Lenders took over $87 million worth of the businesses, in the form of Maverick Gaming’s main casinos. Other buyers took smaller chunks.
- Persson bought the poker business through a company he manages, not directly. He took the cardroom assets with a $28 million dollar bid. This was fought in court, due to the optics of a bankrupted company being bought back by the founder, but it went nowhere.
- Hundreds of employees are set to lose jobs in November 2026 from the closure of Elko casinos, though Eric is said to be buying them back. Its possible that hundreds of others have already lost their positions.
In 2026, Persson is trying to buy back many of the businesses he once owned, using a new company.
That's where the story ends, for now. Persson seems to be making a comeback in the casino world. Will he return to high-stakes poker? Not today, but perhaps he'll give us more trash-talking highlights soon.