Yeah, the important thing is to ignore any number you ever see in a headline about poker winnings, because it basically just means gross revenues. It says nothing at all about whether someone actually made money. (Okay, so it's pretty hard to lose all of a really big score, but the sort of people who make them are also disproportionately likely to be able to lose them in a hurry as well).
Where I live there's a commercial for online Casino ("Mr Green") where a woman hit a 2,5 million approx. USD jackpot, and 2 years later she won 5 million USD.
The commercial was reported for fraud by someone of the public because it was unbelievable, but the casino showed for the investigators that the winnings were real.
However, guessing that the woman probably played for a lot of her winnings, a second jackpot is not that improbable. And I guess she didn't stop there either ...
That was a game of pure luck though, and Poker seems to be somewhat equal that off golf in skill vs luck at top level.
In response, I give you this snippet from "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow:
> ...if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games... (p. 70-71)
And that's the case of repeated games which would lower the effect of variance on the outcome. The saying "that's why they play the game" applies. You can get around it by defining the better team as the winner of the game but then "the better team wins the game" is tautological.
I wouldn't say she won that money, I'd say she earned it. Lottery one wins at and is pure luck. Poker is some luck but mostly skill and persistance.
FWIW, she refers to it as earnings and income in the quotes in the article.