The Women of Game of Gold: Kyna England and Nikita Luther
GGPoker’s “Game of Gold” gathered sixteen elite poker pros for its poker-meets-reality-TV experiment, and among them was a genuinely international group of women. The two profiled here, Kyna England and Nikita Luther, came to the game from opposite sides of the world and by very different routes, but both used that stage to reach an audience a tournament result alone rarely does. Two more of the cast, Olga Iermolcheva and Maria Ho, have full profiles of their own, further down.
What ties the group together isn’t a playing style. It is that each of them, in a game whose top tables have stayed stubbornly male, made the case for belonging there in the most direct way available: by winning.
Kyna England
Kyna England is one of the more unusual origin stories in recent tournament poker: a mathematics graduate who came to the game late and, inside a few years, was named Player of the Year on a major U.S. tour. She grew up in Chicago, earned a math degree from the University of Colorado, and found poker almost incidentally, through a college roommate and the 2003 World Series broadcast that ended with Chris Moneymaker winning it all. She stepped away for a while, then came back in earnest during the pandemic, this time treating the game as something to get good at rather than just play.
The payoff came in 2021, when she became the first woman ever named Mid-States Poker Tour Player of the Year. The centerpiece was her win at the MSPT Canterbury Park Main Event, where she beat a field of more than a thousand entrants for $186,709, and she closed the Season 12 points race with a lead of several hundred over the runner-up. A season-long points title measures consistency rather than one hot weekend, which is the harder way to win it.
England has put the platform to work. As a Poker Power instructor she teaches the game to women, leaning on the skills it builds away from the table — reading situations, managing risk, deciding with incomplete information. On Game of Gold she held her own in a field that included Daniel Negreanu and Jason Koon, which is the level she is measuring herself against now.
Nikita Luther
Nikita Luther is the most recognized woman in Indian poker, and she got there the modern way. Her introduction to the game was a free-to-play app that happened to reward the numerical thinking she had sharpened at Delhi University. The jump from play money to real stakes, where most hobbyists stop, is the one she actually made.
In 2018 she won a WSOP gold bracelet, taking the $1,000 Tag Team event alongside Giuseppe Pantaleo, and became the first Indian woman ever to win one. Back home it landed as closer to a national moment than a poker result, and it made her India’s most visible ambassador for a game that still fights for legal and cultural acceptance there. She has spent the years since arguing, loudly and credibly, that poker is a mind sport built on skill rather than luck.
That advocacy is a big part of what she brought to Game of Gold. The same preparation and composure that won her a bracelet translated cleanly to a format built to expose players with only one gear, in front of an audience that had nothing to do with poker specifically.
Two More From the Cast
England and Luther weren’t the only women in Game of Gold. Two others in the cast have full profiles of their own, and both are worth the click.
Olga Iermolcheva was training to be an English and literature teacher in Ukraine when a classmate introduced her to poker. She turned that into a European tournament career — a runner-up finish at the Latin American Poker Tour Main Event in Panama, a 2019 Nations Cup title representing Ukraine, and roughly $780,000 in live earnings. On Game of Gold she used her lower profile as a weapon, three-betting light and making hero calls, and drew open praise from Daniel Negreanu for it.
Maria Ho is the most decorated player in this group: more than $5 million in live earnings, a 2018 induction into the Women in Poker Hall of Fame, and the only player ever to finish as the WSOP Main Event’s “Last Woman Standing” four separate times. She is also a broadcaster — the first woman hired as a strategic commentator on a poker telecast, and the 2019 Global Poker Award Broadcaster of the Year — and on Game of Gold she backed the resume up, firing big bluffs at Dan “Jungleman” Cates.
Room at the Table
Four women, four countries, four routes into the game: a math major from Chicago, an app player from Delhi, a would-be literature teacher from Ukraine, and a Hall of Famer from California by way of Taipei. Game of Gold put them on the same set, but the more interesting thing they share is older than the show.
Poker likes to call itself a meritocracy, while its biggest tables stay heavily male. Each of these four answered that the only way the game respects: by winning, on the record, against everyone. The modern stars now sitting in those games as a matter of course are the proof the argument is being won.
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About the Author: Maury Orton is a poker writer and editor contributing to GGPoker. He focuses on clear, reliable explanations of the game, drawing on years of experience in online poker media and digital publishing.
