Norwegian poker players: the money list and the championship record

Norway produces world-class tournament players and almost no domestic tournaments. The country permits one national championship a year, so with very few exceptions the money below was won outside Norway — at the WSOP, on the European circuit and in the high-roller series that follow it around. This page now holds two separate records: the international money list, and the Norwegian championship's own cumulative player ranking, which measures something the money list cannot.

How to read this list

The ordering is by total recorded live tournament earnings in US dollars, which is the unit The Hendon Mob reports in. Every figure on these pages was read from that player's own money-list entry and carries the date it was checked, because these numbers move whenever a player cashes — and, as the examples below show, they also move when the database corrects an older result. Where a figure is older than our review interval it goes back into the queue to be re-read rather than quietly ageing on the page.

The names at the top

Kayhan Mokri Roshanfekr leads our Norwegian list at $24,352,975, ahead of Espen Uhlen Jorstad at $19,795,361. Behind them the list is closely packed: Felix Stephensen at $5,851,265 and Tom-Aksel Bedell at $5,740,630, then a cluster between roughly $2.9 million and $4.1 million that takes in Morten Klein, Annette Obrestad, Jon Kyte, Espen Myrmo, Johnny Lodden and Thor Hansen. All of these were re-read from The Hendon Mob's Norway all-time money list on 14 October 2026, which ranks 7,378 Norwegian players in total.

Three of those figures have moved since we first published them in September, and it is worth being explicit about why rather than silently swapping the numbers. Jorstad's total was $19,796,079 on 22 September and is $19,795,361 now, a $718 revision we have since confirmed with two independent reads a week apart. Bedell's dropped $11,798, from $5,752,428. Stephensen's rose by a single dollar. Revisions like these happen when the database reconciles or corrects an older result, and they are the reason every figure here is dated.

That shape says something about the country. Two players have broken away into high-roller money; the rest of the top ten sit within a few million dollars of each other, which is what a money list looks like when it is built from main events and mid-stakes festivals rather than from a domestic circuit.

The domestic record is a different list

The money list is about Norwegians abroad. The Norwegian championship keeps its own cumulative player ranking covering its 2015 to 2025 editions, and almost none of the names at the top of it appear near the top of the money list.

Martin Jonassen Leithe leads that ranking with 4,148.1 player points and is the only player with championship trophies in three different disciplines — the Turbo in 2019, the Main Event in 2022 and the High Roller in 2025. Robert Kaggerud is second on 3,403.4, pairing the 2018 Main Event with the 2019 Mixed Limit 8-Game. The organiser does not publish how the points are calculated, so we treat the figure as its own internal measure of consistency across eleven editions rather than a rating comparable to anything international.

The third name is the one worth noticing. Oscar Andre Kathrud sits on 2,829.2 points, ahead of several Main Event champions, and does not appear on the organiser's champions list in any discipline. The same holds for Acid Nilsen, Espen Ringstad, Thomas Harnes and Christian Arstad in sixth through ninth. A ranking built on repeated deep finishes surfaces a whole group of players that a trophy count makes invisible, and neither list on its own tells you who the best Norwegian tournament players are.

The current champion

Martynas Stoskus won the 2026 Main Event for 1,300,000 kroner. The championship ranking stops at 2025 and does not list him, so on the organiser's own records this year's biggest Norwegian result belongs to a player with no earlier recorded finish in the series. The richest Main Event on the published list is still 2025, when Joakim Brox took 1,340,000 kroner.

Norwegians abroad

Several of the players near the top of the money list are recorded at addresses outside Norway — London and Vienna among them. That is not incidental. A country with one legal tournament series a year gives a serious player no reason to be based there, and the Norwegian tax treatment of gambling winnings is a second reason players look at. Our Norway market page covers the legal position in full; the short version is that Norwegian poker is a story about Norwegians playing somewhere else.

Two championships, one name

There is a naming trap here that is worth untangling, because both events answer to the Norwegian championship title and we have seen them conflated.

The Norgesmesterskap i poker played inside Norway runs for about ten days each autumn at Thon Congress Gardermoen, near Jessheim, under a permit from the gambling regulator, with hard statutory limits on entrants, losses and first prize. It ran 25 September to 4 October 2026 and returns 2 to 10 October 2027.

Separately, an event billed as Norgesmesterskapet i Poker is played at Banco Casino in Bratislava, Slovakia, outside the Norwegian permit regime entirely; its 2027 edition runs 3 to 14 March, in the same city as its 2026 edition. Checked against both organisers' own sites on 14 October 2026, these are two distinct championships rather than one series with a spring leg — an earlier version of this page described them as the latter, and that was wrong. Our Norway tournaments page files them separately and carries both schedules and the Norwegian ceilings.

Earnings figures are attributed to The Hendon Mob. The championship ranking, the title list and the kroner prize figures come from the organiser's own pages at norgesmesterskapetipoker.no, read on 14 October 2026.