Player Snapshot
| Full name | Aleks Dimitrov (also: Aleksandar Dimitrov, Alex Dimitrov) |
| Nationality | Bulgarian |
| Hometown / base | Sofia, Bulgaria (Hendon Mob) |
| Date of birth | Not publicly verified |
| Live tournament earnings | $1,591,648 (Hendon Mob, July 2025) |
| Best live cash | $410,657 |
| WSOP bracelets | 0 |
| WSOP rings | 0 |
| WSOP total earnings | $902,606 (WSOP.com) |
| WPT titles | 0 |
| EPT titles | 0 |
| Online screen names | “grinder1992” (PokerStars); “alexd2” (PocketFives) |
| Online MTT earnings | $10M+ (Dimitrov, Poker Academy, 2023) |
| Playing style | High-volume MTT; PKO/ICM specialist; GTO-informed |
| Sponsors / team | None verified |
Who Is Aleks Dimitrov?
The most revealing thing about Aleks Dimitrov’s poker career is not the number you find on Hendon Mob — $1,591,648 in live tournament earnings, solid but not stratospheric — it is the number that does not appear there at all. Dimitrov, who plays as “grinder1992” on PokerStars, has stated publicly that his online tournament winnings exceed $10 million. In 2016, he reached second place on the PocketFives global rankings. His Hendon Mob profile lists over 5,600 documented online results. The gap between those figures and his public profile is enormous, and it is almost entirely a product of the anonymity that comes with spending a career behind a screen name rather than in front of tournament cameras.
Dimitrov is the most accomplished Bulgarian online MTT player in the history of the game — a distinction that no existing coverage in English-language poker media has fully explored. He built that record from $1.50 sit-and-gos starting in 2011, grinding with a discipline about bankroll management that he has cited as central to everything he achieved online. When he has crossed over to the live circuit — at the WSOP, at European stops, at the Wynn — he has arrived not as a tourist but as a player who belongs. His third-place finish in the 2024 WSOP $10,000 6-Handed No-Limit Hold’em Championship, sharing a final table with Adrian Mateos and two-time bracelet winner Alexandre Reard, confirmed as much.
In May 2026, he won the $5,200 Thursday Thrill PKO event in the PokerStars Anniversary Series, defeating online legend Niklas Astedt heads-up for a $77,118 payout. It was the latest entry in a career that has been running at a high level for fifteen years and attracting proportionally little attention for almost all of them.
Early Life and Path to Poker
Dimitrov is from Sofia, Bulgaria, and began his professional poker career in 2011. The entry point, by his own account, could not have been more modest. In a professional biography published by Poker Academy in October 2023, he described the beginning in a single sentence: “My poker journey began modestly with a 1.5$ SNG table, eventually progressing to 1k$ MTTs.”
Bulgaria produced a notable wave of serious poker talent across the 2010s. Dimitar Danchev sits at the top of the country’s Hendon Mob all-time list with $4.67 million in live earnings, including a $1.86 million win at the 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event. Stoyan Madanzhiev took down the $5,000 Online Main Event at the 2020 WSOP for $3.9 million. These players made their names in high-profile live events with built-in media coverage. Dimitrov took a different path entirely — deep into online tournament volume, building a record that the live poker world largely overlooked.
The cornerstone of that building process was bankroll management. In the same Poker Academy biography, Dimitrov described maintaining an average buy-in of approximately $350 across his online career, a figure that reflects not financial limitation but deliberate game selection — staying in tournaments where his edge was largest while managing variance across an enormous volume of events. It is the kind of structural discipline that separates professional grinders from recreational players who run hot and cash out, and it is the framework that turned a $1.50 starting point into the career he has now.
Career Timeline and Breakthrough
The earliest live results in Dimitrov’s Hendon Mob record date from around 2014 and 2015, with modest cashes at European stops including a Venice event and EPT Barcelona. These were small scores — the live exposure that online players typically accumulate when they begin travelling to festivals between sessions. The real story of those years was not the live results but the online volume: thousands of tournaments, an ascending buy-in range, and the accumulation of the points that would eventually lift him to second on the PocketFives global leaderboard in 2016.
That PocketFives ranking is the single most significant underreported fact about Dimitrov’s career. PocketFives’ global rankings track accumulated performance points across major online poker platforms, and reaching second in the world represents a sustained period of elite performance — not a breakout score but a full year of consistently finishing near the top of the field in high-volume online tournaments. The leaderboard at that level is populated by players who go on to be recognisable names in international poker. Dimitrov reached it and remained largely anonymous outside the online community.
By 2019 he was investing more heavily in live play, entering the partypoker MILLIONS Europe $10,300 Main Event in Rozvadov and making the money at the WSOP in a $5,000 6-Max event. The live game was a secondary project to the online volume, and the results reflected that: consistent cashing, no major scores. That changed in 2024.
At the 2024 WSOP, Dimitrov entered Event #94 — the $10,000 6-Handed No-Limit Hold’em Championship — and made the final table of one of the most talent-dense events of the summer. The six-handed format, which concentrates pressure and rewards preflop aggression and positional awareness, suited his style. Dimitrov sent Egor Procop to the rail with pocket jacks and navigated the middle stages of the final alongside Mateos, Scott Seiver, and Reard — players with dozens of WSOP cashes and multiple bracelets between them. He reached three-handed play before his 5♣4♣ two-pair ran into Reard’s 7♥5♦ on a board that gave the Frenchman a better two pair. The elimination earned Dimitrov $410,657 — his career-best live cash, and a result that confirmed the live game was no longer secondary.
The online career accelerated again in 2025. At the WCOOP, Dimitrov won three titles under “grinder1992” — all in PKO and turbo formats, the structures in which he has the deepest expertise. He became one of only a handful of players to win three or more events at a single WCOOP series. In May 2026, the Anniversary Series win over Astedt added another headline result, this one against an opponent the poker world widely considers one of the greatest online MTT players ever to play the game.
Key Titles and Biggest Results
| Event | Year | Finish | Prize | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WSOP Event #94: $10,000 6-Handed NLHE Championship | 2024 | 3rd of 418 entries | $410,657 | Career-best live cash; final table with Mateos, Seiver, Reard |
| PokerStars Anniversary Series $5,200 Thursday Thrill PKO | 2026 | 1st | $77,118 | Defeated Niklas Astedt heads-up |
| WCOOP $530 Bounty Builder HR | 2025 | 1st | $39,924 | One of three 2025 WCOOP titles |
| WCOOP $530 7-Max Turbo PKO | 2025 | 1st | $22,617 | WCOOP title |
| WCOOP $530 6-Max Turbo PKO | 2025 | 1st | $20,992 | WCOOP title |
Live results sourced from Hendon Mob (July 2025) and PokerNews. Online results from PokerStars published coverage. WSOP.com records $902,606 in total WSOP earnings across 126 cashes with no bracelets or rings.
What this table reveals, and what no stat page captures, is the scale of the split between Dimitrov’s live and online profiles. His five biggest documented results include one significant live cash and four online victories. His three WCOOP titles all came in PKO and turbo structures where buy-ins sit well below the nosebleed tier — $530 events, not $10,000 ones — which means the volume required to accumulate that kind of record is substantial. These are not lottery-ticket scores from a single deep run. They are the product of sustained elite performance across a format that punishes players who do not understand bounty equity and ICM simultaneously.
Playing Style and Strategic Identity
Dimitrov describes his own game in terms that reflect a player who came up through the volume era and has since rebuilt his approach around modern tools. In his Poker Academy coaching introduction, he described his recent focus as “mastering GTO, PKOs, and ICM” — three areas that, taken together, define the intellectual framework of contemporary online tournament play.
The PKO dimension is the most distinctive. Progressive knockout tournaments require a separate equity model from standard MTT play: the bounty component changes calling thresholds, shove frequencies, and preflop ranges in ways that deviate significantly from solver outputs generated without bounty consideration. Many tournament players treat PKOs as standard MTTs with a small cash bonus attached; elite PKO players treat them as a different game. Dimitrov’s coaching work at Poker Academy focused specifically on PKO theory, and his WCOOP results suggest that expertise is genuine rather than theoretical.
His live final table play at the 2024 WSOP event showed a patient, selective aggression more characteristic of a player who has spent years in high-volume online environments than of the loose-aggressive stereotype associated with online grinders transitioning to live. The PokerNews hand histories from that final table show him picking spots carefully — using pocket jacks to eliminate Procop, then working through a series of three-handed pots against Rocco and Reard before running into bad timing at a critical moment. The decision to call off his stack with two pair in the spot that ended his run was not clearly wrong; he had a strong two-pair on a board where Reard’s range contained enough bluffs and weaker value hands to make the call reasonable in isolation.
Online, “grinder1992” is a known quantity in the mid-to-high buy-in tournament lobby. Defeating Niklas Astedt heads-up in the 2026 Anniversary Series is not a result that requires contextualisation — Astedt is one of the most decorated online tournament players in history, with WSOP Main Event final table experience, multiple WCOOP wins, and a sustained elite record across platforms. Beating him at a $5,200 final table is a clean measure of where Dimitrov sits in the online hierarchy.
Online Poker and Cash Games
Dimitrov’s online career is the primary story of his poker life and the one that existing coverage comes closest to ignoring entirely.
He plays as “grinder1992” on PokerStars and is tracked under “alexd2” on PocketFives, where Hendon Mob lists over 5,600 online results sourced from PocketFives data — and those are only results from tournaments where real-name confirmation occurred. The actual volume is higher. In 2023, Dimitrov stated his online MTT winnings exceed $10 million; this figure is self-reported in a professional context and should be understood as an attributed estimate rather than a third-party-audited total, though the 2016 PocketFives second-place global ranking is a verified third-party data point that is consistent with a career of that magnitude.
The average buy-in of approximately $350, maintained across that volume, reflects a structure that prioritises expected value over variance. Playing $350 buy-ins when your online career has generated eight-figure winnings is a choice, not a constraint — it means Dimitrov has spent most of his career in tournaments where his edge over the field is largest, rather than gravitating toward the prestige of five and six-figure buy-ins.
He also runs an independent coaching presence through a Facebook group, “Alex ‘Grinder1992’ Poker Coaching,” and has delivered professional coaching sessions at Poker Academy focused on PKO theory and ICM.
No documented high-stakes cash game appearances at venues such as Hustler Casino Live, Live at the Bike, or Triton have been identified.
Beyond the Felt
Dimitrov’s public profile outside tournament results is intentionally minimal. His primary public-facing work is coaching — the Poker Academy sessions from October 2023 were his first formal entry into the coaching market, focused on progressive knockout strategy for online players. He maintains the Facebook coaching group as an independent channel.
No books, television appearances, podcast presence, or formal sponsorship arrangements have been documented or verified.
Current Status and What to Watch
As of May 2026, Dimitrov is active at the highest levels of online tournament poker and continues to make live appearances when the schedule warrants it. The Anniversary Series win this month is the most recent data point: a $5,200 buy-in final table, heads-up against Niklas Astedt, won. His Hendon Mob record shows continued live cashing through July 2025. With the 2026 WSOP summer series approaching, his 2024 third-place finish in a $10,000 event and his pattern of consistent WSOP volume — $902,606 across 126 cashes with no bracelets, per WSOP.com — make him a realistic candidate for another deep run. The bracelet that would translate his online pedigree into live recognition remains the outstanding item on the list.
Watch for: further high-stakes PokerStars series results as “grinder1992,” any live tournament schedule additions through the summer, and whether Dimitrov makes another run at a WSOP $10,000 event in 2026 following the 2024 breakthrough.
Frequently Asked Questions
His verified live tournament earnings are $1,591,648, per Hendon Mob as of July 2025. His WSOP-specific earnings are $902,606 across 126 cashes, per WSOP.com. In a 2023 professional coaching biography for Poker Academy, Dimitrov stated his online MTT winnings exceed $10 million — this figure is self-reported and covers PokerStars and other platforms not included in live database totals.
Zero. Dimitrov has cashed 126 times at the WSOP for $902,606 in total earnings, per WSOP.com, without winning a bracelet or ring. His deepest recorded WSOP finish is a 3rd-place result in the 2024 $10,000 6-Handed No-Limit Hold’em Championship for $410,657.
Dimitrov is a high-volume tournament specialist with particular expertise in progressive knockout and ICM-intensive formats. He plays a GTO-informed game refined across more than a decade of online grinding, with a stated focus on PKO equity calculations and late-stage ICM. His live play has shown patience and selective aggression rather than the unrestrained aggression sometimes associated with online players making the live transition.
He is Bulgarian, from Sofia, Bulgaria, where his Hendon Mob profile lists his residence. He is the most accomplished Bulgarian online MTT player in documented poker history.
Yes. His Hendon Mob record shows live activity through July 2025, and in May 2026 he won the $5,200 Thursday Thrill PKO event in the PokerStars Anniversary Series, defeating Niklas Astedt heads-up for $77,118. He continues to play regularly online as “grinder1992” on PokerStars.
He plays as “grinder1992” on PokerStars and is tracked under the handle “alexd2” on PocketFives, where he reached 2nd place on the global rankings in 2016.