In the late 1970s Mumford established Chow stability of smooth unpointed genus g curves embedded by complete linear systems of degree d ≥ 2g + 1, and at about the same time Gieseker established asymptotic Hilbert stability (that is, stability of m th Hilbert points for some large values of m) under the same hypotheses. Both of them then use an indirect argument to show that nodal Deligne-Mumford stable curves are GIT stable. The case of marked points lay untouched until 2006, when Elizabeth Baldwin proved that pointed Deligne-Mumford stable curves are asymptotically Hilbert stable. (Actually, she proved this for stable maps, which includes stable curves as a special case.) Her argument is a delicate induction on g and the number of marked points n; elliptic tails are glued to the marked points one by one, ultimately relating stability of an n-pointed genus g curve to Gieseker’s result for genus g + n unpointed curves. There are three ways one might wish to improve upon Baldwin’s results. First, one might wish to construct moduli spaces of weighted pointed curves or maps; it appears that Baldwin’s proof can accommodate some, but not all, sets of weights. Second, one might wish to study Hilbert stability for small values of m; since Baldwin’s proof uses Gieseker’s proof as the base case, it is not easy to see how it could be modified to yield an approach for small m. Finally, the Minimal Model Program for moduli spaces of curves has generated interest in GIT for 2, 3, or 4-canonical linear systems; due to its use of elliptic tails, Baldwin’s proof cannot be used to study these, as elliptic tails are known to be GIT unstable in these cases. In this paper I give a direct proof that smooth curves with distinct weighted marked points are asymptotically Hilbert stable with respect to a wide range of parameter spaces and linearizations. Some of these yield the (coarse) moduli space of Deligne-Mumford stable pointed curves M g,n and Hassett’s moduli spaces of weighted pointed curves M g,A, while other linearizations may give other quotients which are birational to these and which may admit interpretations as moduli spaces. The full construction of the moduli spaces is not contained in this paper, only the proof that smooth curves with distinct weighted marked points are stable, which is the key new result needed for the construction. For this I follow Gieseker’s approach to reduce to the GIT problem to a combinatorial problem, though the solution is very different.