Nikhil Arcot aka Nik Airball, is a high stakes poker player who rose to fame astronomically. His polarising personality coupled with fearless aggression is a perfect match for Hustler Casino Live.
He finished his education with a stint at New York University Shanghai, receiving his bachelor’s degree in business and finance.
He also picked up fluency in Mandarin Chinese which would become helpful during his poker career.
A career in investment banking followed, with a role at KAL Capital said to have earned him a lot of money from selling defence contracts.
During this time Airball was getting deeper into the poker scene and soon faced an ultimatum from his employers: a career in finance or poker, but not both.
And then the deeper Nik Airball got into the high-stakes poker scene, the more questions the fans had. Where did his bankroll come from, for a start.
Rumour had it that he made around $20-30 million from investment banking, but this is something Airball was coy about on the Nick Vertucci Show. Many then took this to mean he had even more money.
The fan’s favourite theory is that he has significant wealth from his finance career and then span it up into something huge from private games. This makes sense.
But in an interview with Doug Polk, Airball unwittingly speaks about how he lost $20,000 in a game during college. Where did that money come from because it was before he ever had a job.
Nik Airball sufffers a $8,000,000 Downswing!
It’s fair to say that Nik Airball’s public poker career started off with a bang. From February 2022 to a little more than a year later, Airball showed profit of more than $1.5 million — but then reality hit!
In September 2023, he revealed that he was on an eye-watering downswing of around $8 million. Ouch!
And then there’s the personal side to poker downswings. Airball told Nick Vertucci that it is true that fake friends start to abandon you when the going gets tough and the money isn’t a free flowing as before.
There was also the fallout from the J4 scandal where Garrett Adelstein insinuated that Airball could have been involved in cheating.
This being so high-profile publicly caused issues with his job which he was still working at.
With so much negativity hanging over him, it was probably a bad time to get embroiled in a spat with Matt Berkey and morally obliged to accept a head-up challenge which he lost heavily.
Sixty hours over ten days saw Airball a million dollars down and feeling humbled.
And who can forget when he dusted off a million dollars on Hustler Casino Live and then found out he’d been scammed for millions in a private game with marked cards.
It’s been a roller coaster for Nik Airball, but we have to say that it’s been good to have him around and hope he’ll be here for a long time.
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