High Stakes Poker Regular Lynne Ji Charged With Attempted Murder

If you know Lynne Ji in poker, it might be for this spectacular hand.

Playing High Stakes Poker in January 2021, poker booming post-lockdown, there was an insane line-up in the game. Rick Salomon opened and after a few called, Jean-Robert Bellande (mostly known as JRB) pumped it up from the straddle. Tom Dwan made it $54,000 from the button with Q♠Q♣.

Ji looked down at Q♥10♥ in the big blind and for some reason decided to put in $163,000 all-in.

Bellande came over the top for $399,000 with A♣K♣. Dwan had them both covered and shoved. They ran the board three times, Dwan won every one of them, and the pot finished at just under $1 million.

It's the sort of punt that gets clipped, reposted and amazed at over for years afterwards, and it did more for her name than any result ever has. She lost over $300,000 across that High Stakes Poker season. She's been a regular on Hustler Casino Live ever since, and has sat in games with Daniel Negreanu, Doug Polk and Matt Berkey.

On October 10 she was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of attempted murder.

Bail was set at a million dollars, she posted it and was out the next day. Six days after that she wrote on X: "I fully deny all charges and I look forward to clearing my name in court."

That, give or take, is everything about this case anybody has actually confirmed.

Nobody has got anything out of the LAPD. As of last week no charging document, case number or court date had been published anywhere. Two weeks on, the only detailed account of what happened in that apartment has come from a Doug Polk interview.

The alleged victim is Kevin "KGAO" Gao, Ji's on-and-off partner and another familiar face from the same streams.

Gao alleges that Ji attacked him, that he locked himself away and called 911, and that she came through the door with a kitchen knife. He says he ended up handcuffed at the hospital while officers looked into a suggestion that he'd done it to himself, which he rejects outright. "It's physically not possible for me to have reached there with a knife," he told Polk, showing where he was stabbed.

None of it has been tested anywhere, and nobody covering the interview has been able to verify it independently. Ji's version has only reached the public secondhand, through what Gao says a mutual friend told him.

Everything the public knows about this has come through social media and a podcast. Not a filing, not a police statement, not a courtroom. That's been the pattern with poker's scandals for years. This one ends somewhere those don't.

Attempted murder in California without premeditation carries five, seven or nine years. If prosecutors allege premeditation and a jury agrees, it's life with the possibility of parole.

Ji hasn't said anything beyond her denial. If she has lawyers, they haven't spoken. The LAPD hasn't either. The next thing in this case that anyone can check will happen in a courtroom, and nobody has reported when that is.