Renee Xie has rewritten the record books on the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour, becoming the first female GUKPT champion in the tour’s history after taking down the £560 GUKPT Luton Main Event for £35,435. The win, sealed on the eighth stop of the tour’s 20th season, ended a run of almost 400 Main Events without a female winner.
A 396-Runner Field and a Historic First
GUKPT Luton drew 396 entries into its Main Event, building a £188,100 prize pool for a tour that has been running continuously for two decades. The Grosvenor UK Poker Tour has long been one of the cornerstones of the British live circuit, staging multiple legs a year across Grosvenor’s casino network and crowning a long list of well-known UK regulars along the way. Xie’s win instantly stood out from the hundreds of GUKPT Main Events staged since the tour’s launch, because in all that time, across close to 400 individual title fights, no woman had ever closed one out. Xie’s name now sits alone at the top of that particular list, a milestone that resonated well beyond the Luton grinders who watched it happen live.
The Hand That Sealed It
The tournament came down to a heads-up battle between Xie and Sanjay Ranchhoddas, who ultimately settled for £28,545 as runner-up. On the final hand, Xie was holding ten-eight when she got the money in against Ranchhoddas’s ace-three of hearts. The board ran out ten-nine-nine-seven-queen, pairing Xie’s ten to hold up and end the tournament on the spot. It was a fittingly dramatic finish to a Main Event that had also seen 2022 GUKPT London champion Timothy Chung fall in eighth place for £3,790, and Ciaran McCullagh bust in fifth for £8,480, before the tournament boiled down to its decisive two-handed finish. Third place went to Christopher Gallagher, who banked £26,930 after finishers agreed to an ICM-based deal near the finish, with Xie’s own total, including that deal money, coming to £44,535.
A Career Built Since 2017
Xie’s win in Luton was not a one-off appearance in the winner’s circle. Her previous career-best result had been a runner-up finish at the 2017 GUKPT Leeds Main Event, where she banked £33,000, itself a strong result on a tour known for producing tough, recognizable regulars over the years. Coming back nearly a decade later to convert a similar deep run into an outright title, and a historic one at that, speaks to a level of patience and consistency that does not always get the same attention as a single breakout score. For Xie, Luton represents both a new career-best payday and a considerably bigger milestone than the number on the check. Grinding a national tour for the better part of a decade without a marquee title, then finally converting, is a far more common path to a breakthrough win than the overnight stories that tend to dominate headlines, and it is a reminder that live tournament success is very often built on years of accumulated experience at the table rather than a single lucky run.
Why the Milestone Matters
Poker has spent years discussing the gap between how many women play the game recreationally and how few reach the latter stages of major live Main Events, let alone win them outright. A tour as established as GUKPT, now in its 20th season, running nearly 400 Main Events without a female champion is exactly the kind of statistic that gets cited in those conversations. Xie’s win does not erase that history, but it does give the tour, and the wider UK live scene, its first concrete answer to the question of when a woman would finally break through in a GUKPT Main Event. For newer players still learning how starting hands like ten-eight can turn into a tournament-winning holding against a suited ace-three, Poker Pro Academy’s poker hand rankings guide is a useful primer on how these showdowns actually get decided.
GUKPT’s 20th Season Rolls On
Luton was the tour’s eighth stop of its milestone 20th season, and organizers will now carry Xie’s story into the remaining legs as a reference point for just how competitive, and how historically significant, a single GUKPT Main Event can turn out to be. With multiple stops still to come before the season wraps, the tour has already delivered one of its most talked-about results in years, and Xie’s name will now be attached to GUKPT history regardless of how the rest of the season plays out.
Results like this are a reminder that outcomes in live tournament poker remain unpredictable and that the game should always be enjoyed responsibly by adults of legal age, without treating any single result as a guaranteed path to future income.
