Player snapshot
| Full name | Benjamin Rolle |
| Online alias | bencb789 |
| Nationality | German |
| Date of birth | 3 February 1989 |
| Hometown | Cottbus, Germany |
| Current base | Vienna, Austria (previously England and Sweden) |
| Live tournament earnings | $124,090 (Hendon Mob, last updated July 2023) |
| Online tournament earnings | $35 million+ (widely cited; Rolle’s own 2024 breakdown showed ~$440,000 net across two platforms) |
| WSOP bracelets | 1 (2025 WSOP Online Main Event) |
| WPT titles | 0 |
| EPT titles | 0 |
| Other major titles | 2016 WCOOP 102,000SuperHighRoller;multipleSCOOPtitles;GGMillion High Roller titles (2021, 2022) |
| Playing style | Analytical, exploitative, disciplined — GTO-literate but explicitly exploit-first |
| Current sponsor | CoinPoker (ambassador, since November 2024) |
| Previous sponsor | PokerStars Team Pro (August 2021 – August 2022) |
| Business | Founder, Raise Your Edge (training platform, founded in the mid-2010s) |
Who is Benjamin Rolle?
Benjamin Rolle is, by almost any serious measure, one of the best online multi-table tournament players of his generation — and also the most prominent online MTT coach in the European market. He is the rare professional whose student base may have influenced more modern tournament strategy than his own results, and that is saying something given the results. His Hendon Mob page shows just $124,090 in live earnings, yet he has banked more than $35 million online, including a $3.9 million first prize and a WSOP bracelet for winning the 2025 WSOP Online Main Event on GGPoker.
What makes Rolle genuinely distinct is not the money. It is the insistence, in an era where “solver” and “GTO” have become default vocabulary, that reading opponents and playing extreme, lopsided strategies still wins the most money. In a 2025 PokerNews column drawing on his public statements, Rolle argued that most players fail to understand the importance of exploitative poker and are too afraid to play at extremes — range-calling, range-folding, or three-bet bluffing with unusually wide frequencies. For a coach who could easily sell shrink-wrapped solver output, that is a deliberately contrarian philosophy, and it has become the organising idea of his work both at the tables and inside Raise Your Edge, the training site he founded.
The one-line thesis is this: Rolle built his career by being an online tournament specialist who treats poker as an opponent-modelling problem first and a math problem second, and he has spent the past decade teaching other people to do the same.
Early life and path to poker
Rolle was born in Cottbus, a city in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany, on 3 February 1989. Before poker, he was a competitive athlete in two different disciplines. He played youth football for the Energie Cottbus system — a Bundesliga-level club at the time — and later at lower amateur levels for Kahrener SV 03 and FSV Viktoria Cottbus. He then migrated, as many of his generation did, into competitive Counter-Strike, though esports in Germany was not yet a professional career path when Rolle was a teenager.
He discovered poker around 2008, in his late teens, during the tail end of the post-Moneymaker boom. Like most German-speaking online players of that era, he started on Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, grinding small-stakes sit-and-gos as “bencb789.” Multiple profile pieces, including Gipsy Team’s interview archive, describe him logging upwards of 90,000 sit-and-go matches with buy-ins up to $500 — a volume baseline that is difficult to overstate and that still shows in his game today.
His path to full-time professional poker was not especially romantic. He was, by his own account on the Chasing Poker Greatness podcast in 2022, studying for a degree and treating poker as a plan-B career that gradually became plan A. Around 2014 he moved from Germany to England, partly for tax reasons and partly to live with other German-speaking online grinders, and that shared-house study culture became, in his telling, the single most important structural decision of his career.
Career timeline and breakthrough
First significant result — 2014 SCOOP. Rolle’s first meaningful score arrived at the 2014 Spring Championship of Online Poker, where he finished deep in a SCOOP event for approximately $243,000 after a four-way deal. He has said in interviews that the score mattered less than the trip itself: he and ten other online grinders had rented a private retreat in Canada, roughly 200km north of Toronto, and the celebrations stayed with him more than the money.
Breakthrough — 2016 WCOOP $102K Super High Roller. The result that moved him from “respected online grinder” to internationally known name came on 12 September 2016. PokerStars had doubled the buy-in of its WCOOP Super High Roller from $51,000 the previous year to $102,000 — at the time the largest buy-in event in online poker history. The 28-entry field included Isaac Haxton, Mikita Badziakouski, Igor Kurganov, Doug Polk, Jason Mercier and Bryn Kenney. Rolle reached heads-up against Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz, then in the middle of the most celebrated year in modern tournament poker, and the two agreed a chip-chop that left $56,000 and the title on the table. A few hands later Holz ran a multi-street bluff into Rolle’s K♠4♠ two pair on a K♦6♣2♠4♣ board, and Rolle shipped it for a headline prize of $1,172,461.
That hand is still played inside Rolle’s own Tournament Masterclass course, in a segment where he walks through his thought process from the big-blind call preflop to the river snap-call against Holz’s all-in.
Peak years — 2020–2025. The launch of GGPoker’s high-buy-in online tournament series gave Rolle a natural habitat. Between 2021 and 2025 he reached 20 final tables of the weekly 10,000GGMillion High Roller, winning at least two (2021 and 2022). He added multiple SCOOP titles on PokerStars. According to WSOP.com, his total career earnings on WSOP-branded events alone now exceed $4.8 million across 11 in-the-money finishes.
The setback, and the response — 2024 and 2025 WSOP Online Main Events. In 2024, Rolle reached the final table of the $5,000 WSOP Online Main Event on GGPoker, but entered as the short stack and busted in eighth place for $651,921. He has described the result as a driver for his 2025 preparation. Twelve months later, he returned to the same final table as chip leader, controlled the action across a 21-hour run, and closed it heads-up against Russia’s Anatoly Zlotnikov with a dominant K-Q holding up against A-9. The $3,900,707 first prize was his career-biggest score, and the gold bracelet was his first.
Current status — 2026. In March 2026, Rolle came within one final table of completing an online double that would have sealed an almost unarguable “online GOAT” case: he reached the final table of the $5,200 SCOOP Main Event on PokerStars as the reigning WSOP Online Main Event champion. He finished eighth for $49,756. He remains one of the most-watched online regulars in the world.
Key titles and biggest results
Results verified against PokerNews, Card Player and WSOP.com reporting. Prize amounts are in USD.
| Event | Year | Finish | Prize | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WSOP Online Main Event ($5,000 NLHE, GGPoker) | 2025 | 1st | $3,900,707 | 5,961 entries; first WSOP bracelet; defeated Anatoly Zlotnikov heads-up |
| WCOOP $102,000 Super High Roller (PokerStars) | 2016 | 1st | $1,172,461 | Largest buy-in online event in history at the time; heads-up deal vs Fedor Holz |
| WSOP Online Main Event ($5,000 NLHE, GGPoker) | 2024 | 8th | $651,921 | Short-stack finish; set up the 2025 run |
| GGPoker Super MILLION$ | 2021 | 1st | $424,850 | Short-stacked coming into the final table |
| Sunday Million Special Edition ($25K, GGPoker) | 2022 | 1st/T1 | $393,222 | Deal heads-up with Mikita Badziakouski |
| GGPoker Super MILLION$ | 2022 | 1st | $357,739 | Entered final table as chip leader |
| GGMillion$ High Roller | 2025 | 1st | $310,746 | Beat Pedro Neves heads-up; second GGMillion$ title |
| SCOOP-22 | 2014 | Top 4 (deal) | $243,367 | First major online score |
| PokerStars Championship Barcelona €5,200 NLHE | 2017 | 3rd | $45,310 | His best live tournament cash (Hendon Mob) |
What these numbers actually say about Rolle: he is not a one-hit player and he is not a live tournament specialist. He is a high-volume online final-table machine. Only three of those nine results are one-table tournaments won from short-handed play; the rest are deep runs through full fields of online high rollers. The gap between his $35 million+ in online earnings and his $124,090 on Hendon Mob is not an embarrassment — it is the accurate shape of his career, and it is unusual. Most players with his results have migrated to live Triton and PokerGO events. Rolle, publicly and repeatedly, has said he has no plans to.
Playing style and strategic identity
Rolle’s strategic identity is easier to describe than most top players’ because he teaches it for a living.
Preflop. He plays a tight-aggressive framework that is solver-informed but not solver-bound. In the deep stages of tournaments his opening ranges are conventional; where he deviates is in three-bet and four-bet frequencies against specific player types, where he has been publicly critical of the modern tendency to default to “GTO” frequencies against opponents whose calling and folding tendencies are nowhere close to balanced.
Postflop and at the final table. His hallmark is what he calls “playing at extremes.” In an April 2025 post on X, later covered by PokerNews, Rolle wrote that he is “tired of coaches trying to teach you their ‘you don’t need GTO at all’ approach, or the other direction: ‘You need GTO to crush.'” His argument is that strong players identify the specific nodes on the tree where exploitative deviations are profitable — range-calling a small river bet, range-folding to overbets from certain opponents, or three-bet jamming light against opens that have a solver-implied call but a real-world fold — and he focuses study on identifying those nodes rather than memorising balanced charts.
Under pressure. His 2025 WSOP Online final table is the cleanest available case study. Rolle came in as chip leader, traded the lead several times during the early levels without losing composure, and closed out a 21-hour day. In a self-published Twitter note after the win, he credited a handwritten pre-session plan — one he said he uses “as a reminder during a session when things aren’t going my way, so I stay in charge” — as part of a mental-performance routine that also includes meditation, hypnotherapy work and collaboration with performance coaches including Elliot Roe. That kind of process disclosure is unusual at the top of the game, where most pros keep their routines private.
What peers notice. Rolle has publicly named Samuel Vousden, Adrian Mateos, Mikita Badziakouski and Stephen Chidwick as the players he most respects, specifically for the ability to combine near-perfect solid play with the willingness to make “crazy” moves when the situation demands it. The parallel is obvious: it is a description of what he tries to do himself.
Online poker and cash games
Rolle’s career is an online career. The main screen names attached to his play are “bencb789” on PokerStars (the name that built his reputation) and his real name Benjamin Rolle on GGPoker, where he has done most of his serious grinding since roughly 2022.
His self-reported 2024 results, published on his X account in January 2025, offer the kind of transparency that the wider high-stakes community almost never provides. He reported a roughly $120,000 loss on PokerStars, a $500,000 profit on GGPoker, and $60,000 in rakeback, across approximately 244 hours of play — an average hourly of roughly $1,800 while simultaneously 20-to-25-tabling tournaments from $11 up to $25,000 buy-ins. He noted that he had stopped streaming mid-year and saw a measurable improvement when playing off-stream, on the grounds that not having to narrate his thought process made it easier to identify leaks.
Rolle does not feature in the cash-game circuit. He has no documented presence on Hustler Casino Live, Live at the Bike or the Triton high-stakes cash games, and has publicly said — in his post-WSOP Reddit AMA in October 2025 — that he has no desire to play the Triton Super High Roller Series, preferring to stay in the online grind and build Raise Your Edge.
Beyond the felt
Raise Your Edge. Founded in the mid-2010s, Raise Your Edge is the project that has made Rolle’s name carry weight beyond his own results. The flagship product, the Tournament Masterclass, launched in 2017 and is considered by reviewers at publications including PokerNews and Gutshot Magazine to be a reference text in modern MTT training. The site’s free Discord community has grown to more than 40,000 members, and the paid tiers (now subscription-based after a 2026 pricing restructure) range from introductory to expert courses covering MTT, cash, knockouts, and mindset. His most prominent alumnus, Alex Vuillaumier, took down a 2023 WSOP bracelet for more than $1.1 million, and multiple current online regulars openly credit RYE content with their development.
Sponsorships. Rolle was signed to Team PokerStars Pro in August 2021 alongside Sam Grafton and Parker Talbot. He left the team in August 2022, stating on Twitter that he was “no longer a part of Team Pokerstars,” thanking the company for the opportunity and saying he wanted to focus on “all the exciting projects ahead.” In November 2024 he joined CoinPoker as an ambassador alongside Patrick Leonard, Fernando Habegger and Mario Mosböck.
Media presence. He streamed consistently on Twitch for several years and maintains an active X account (@bencb789) and an Instagram following above 65,000. He has been a recurring interview subject on podcasts including Chasing Poker Greatness and has written publicly about mental-performance work, bankroll management and study habits.
Identity. Rolle played anonymously as “bencb789” for years. He is widely reported to have only publicly revealed his real name and face in 2019, when he began appearing on YouTube and at the WSOP.
Current status and what to watch
At 37, Rolle sits in an unusual position. He has just claimed the most prestigious title available to an online tournament player, the WSOP Online Main Event and its attendant bracelet, and he has done so without meaningfully changing his schedule. He remains based in Vienna, still plays primarily Sundays and major online series, still streams and records sessions for his Raise Your Edge subscribers, and has publicly declined the obvious next step of chasing live Triton tournaments.
The interesting questions for the next twelve months are therefore structural rather than individual. Can he complete the WSOP Online / SCOOP / WCOOP Main Event treble that his March 2026 SCOOP eighth-place finish suggests he is genuinely chasing? Does Raise Your Edge’s new subscription model change the competitive landscape for online tournament education? And at what point does an “online GOAT” argument — for a player with 20 GGMillion$ final tables, multiple SCOOP and WCOOP titles, and a WSOP Online bracelet — start to look uncontestable? The next WSOP Online series will tell us most of what we need to know.
FAQ
Rolle has $124,090 in recorded live tournament earnings according to Hendon Mob (as of July 2023) and more than $35 million in documented online tournament earnings. His single biggest score is the $3,900,707 first prize from the 2025 WSOP Online Main Event.
Rolle has one WSOP bracelet, won at the 2025 WSOP Online Main Event on GGPoker after defeating Anatoly Zlotnikov heads-up. WSOP.com lists his total WSOP earnings at $4,873,004 across 11 in-the-money finishes.
Rolle plays an exploitative, opponent-focused style built on a strong GTO foundation. He is publicly critical of players who default to balanced solver frequencies against unbalanced opponents, and he emphasises reading player types and playing wider, more lopsided ranges when the situation justifies it.
Rolle was born in Cottbus, Germany, on 3 February 1989. He is a German national who has lived in England and Sweden earlier in his career and is currently based in Vienna, Austria.
Yes. Rolle is an active online tournament professional and a CoinPoker ambassador. In March 2026 he reached the final table of the PokerStars SCOOP $5,200 Main Event, finishing eighth for $49,756. He has said publicly that he does not plan to shift to live Triton or major live circuit tournaments in the near future.
Raise Your Edge is Rolle’s poker training platform, founded in the mid-2010s. Its flagship Tournament Masterclass, launched in 2017, is considered one of the leading MTT courses in the industry. The platform has a free Discord community of more than 40,000 members and multiple paid course tiers covering tournament, cash, bounty and mindset content.
Rolle defeated Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz heads-up in the 2016 WCOOP $102,000 Super High Roller on PokerStars, at the time the largest buy-in online tournament in history. The two agreed to a chip-chop with $56,000 and the title left on the table. Rolle took first place for $1,172,461; Holz collected $1,067,639 in second.