Yuri Dzivielevski: Professional Poker Player Profile

Player snapshot

• Full name: Yuri Martins Dzivielevski
• Nationality: Brazilian (Polish heritage through his grandmother)
• Date of birth: 27 November 1991 (age 34)
• Hometown / current base: Born in Brazil; previously based in Florianópolis, currently listed as Curitiba on his Hendon Mob profile
• Live tournament earnings: $11,728,733 (Hendon Mob, as of 16 February 2026)
• WSOP bracelets: 5
• WPT titles: None
• EPT titles: 1 (2022 EPT Monte Carlo €25,000 Single Day High Roller)
• Other major titles: 2026 PGT Super High Roller Bowl Mixed Games champion; 2026 PGT Mixed Games Series champion; 2015 BSOP Grand Final Main Event champion; 2021 GPI Brazil National Player of the Year; 2022 GPI Brazil National Player of the Year; multiple WCOOP and SCOOP titles on PokerStars
• Online screen names: “theNERDguy” on PokerStars; “Y Dzivielevski” on GGPoker; “Yuri theNERDguy” on partypoker (2021–2023)
• Known playing style: Mixed-games specialist; selective aggression; theory-heavy; online-trained
• Current sponsors / team: None publicly active (former partypoker ambassador, September 2021 – January 2023)

Who is Yuri Dzivielevski?

In a poker world where almost everyone who reaches the top reaches it through No-Limit Hold’em, Yuri Dzivielevski took the long way around. Brazil’s most decorated WSOP champion has won five bracelets in six years — and four of those titles came in mixed-game and Pot-Limit Omaha events, not Hold’em. He is, by any reasonable measure, the most complete mixed-games player of his generation, a designation only sharpened by his February 2026 sweep of the PokerGO Tour Mixed Games Series and Super High Roller Bowl Mixed Games title.

What separates Dzivielevski from his peers is the depth and breadth of his game. According to a May 2025 feature by The Overlay, he is one of only a handful of players to finish inside the top 100 of the WSOP Player of the Year race in each of the last five years that points were awarded — and the only one in that group to win five bracelets across that span. His five gold pieces have come in five different formats: Mixed Omaha 8/Stud 8, online Pot-Limit Omaha, H.O.R.S.E., online Pot-Limit Omaha Championship, and Nine-Game Mix.

The numbers carry a story. Dzivielevski is the only Brazilian ever to win five WSOP bracelets, and he became the youngest active member of poker’s exclusive five-bracelet club at age 32 in 2024. His mark of 25 career WSOP final tables and over 170 money finishes (live and online combined) is the résumé of a player who shows up for everything and runs deep more often than almost anyone else on the planet.

Early life and path to poker

Dzivielevski was born in Brazil on 27 November 1991. His surname is Polish — his grandmother emigrated from Poland — though he and his parents were all born in Brazil. He told the Russian poker outlet GipsyTeam in a 2023 interview translated from Jeff Gross’s podcast that the Polish pronunciation is closer to “Div-E-Le-Ski” than the Brazilianized “Ziv-E-Le-Ski” that English-language commentators tend to use.

His path into the game was unglamorous and quietly purposeful. According to a 2021 partypoker announcement of his ambassadorship, his older brother introduced him to poker, and he started in home games with friends as a teenager. He was 16 when he first sat down at a table and 18 when he turned professional. The reason was practical: his family needed money, and he had shown enough early talent online to believe he could earn it. Per a 2019 PokerGO profile, he comes from Florianópolis “byways of Curitiba” — his life since has been split between online grinding and the road.

The “theNERDguy” handle that has followed him through every screen name on every platform has earlier roots than most people realise. According to a PokerListings profile, the nickname comes from his teenage years, when he was part of a Brazilian graffiti crew called Nerds. When he needed an online poker alias at 18, he reached for it. He has said in interviews that it suited him because he liked to learn — a label he has spent the next decade and a half earning the hard way.

Two pieces of his pre-poker life occasionally surface in profiles. WSOP.com noted in 2019 that he had been a former musician and small-business owner before committing fully to the game. He has also been a longtime meditator. He told WSOP.com after his first bracelet win that he had been practising for around six years by that point, framing meditation as a natural fit for a game where players are constantly processing large volumes of information and where, in his words, it is super important to know yourself.

Career timeline and breakthrough

Dzivielevski’s first recorded live cash on Hendon Mob came in April 2010, but his serious tournament career was online from the start. He spent the early years cycling through cash games, sit-and-gos, and tournament formats before settling on MTTs, working under coaches and grinding micro-stakes upward. By 2014 — at 22 — he had reached the world No. 1 ranking on PocketFives, the standard public ranking system for online tournament players. That year he also took the conscious decision to expand into mixed games, learning Pot-Limit Omaha first, then the limit games. He told the World Poker Tour in 2024 that he wanted to keep himself motivated in poker, and that learning new variants was how he did it.

His first significant live result came in May 2015 at the BSOP Grand Final in São Paulo, where he won the R$10,000 Main Event for R$652,509 (approximately $175,155). It remains his only Latin American Poker Tour-affiliated title, but it was the result that announced him as a serious live tournament player.

The breakthrough year was 2019. He arrived at the WSOP that summer with eighteen prior cashes and roughly $200,000 in lifetime Series earnings. He left it with a bracelet and one of the deepest Main Event runs of his career. The bracelet came in Event #51, a $2,500 Mixed Omaha Hi-Lo / Seven Card Stud Hi-Lo event, which he won for $213,750 after coming back from as low as a single big bet. The bigger payday came in the Main Event itself, where he finished 28th out of 8,569 entries for $261,430. According to PokerNews, his Main Event run that summer was, until then, the best WSOP performance by a player who had spent his career primarily online.

The 2020 pandemic-era WSOP Online series produced his second bracelet — a $400 PLO event on GGPoker for $221,557. In December 2021 he became a partypoker ambassador, the first major sponsorship of his career. He was, at the moment of signing, ranked the No. 1 online tournament player in the world by PocketFives.

The peak years that followed delivered both heartbreak and gold. At the 2022 EPT Monte Carlo, Dzivielevski won the €25,000 Single Day High Roller for €448,515, his first major non-WSOP live title. Weeks later, at the 2022 WSOP, he came within a final hand of the $50,000 Poker Players Championship — generally considered the most prestigious mixed-games event in poker. He finished runner-up to Dan Cates for $895,614, his largest live cash to that date. In 2023 he added two more bracelets in two months: the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. live for $207,678, then the $10,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Championship online for $368,343. At the 2024 WSOP he sealed his fifth in five years, taking down the $3,000 Nine-Game Mix for $215,982.

The 2025 WSOP was, by Dzivielevski’s own account in a CardPlayer post-match interview, one of the worst tournament runs of his life. He cashed often but converted nothing — entering Day 2 of the $25,000 High Roller H.O.R.S.E. with the chip lead at one point, only to fall short of the bracelet that would have been his sixth. The streak broke in dramatic fashion in December 2025 at WSOP Paradise in the Bahamas, where he finished third in the $150,000 Triton 8-Handed event for $1,409,000 — the largest live cash of his career. The final three were all Brazilian: Joao Simao took the title and his third bracelet for $3,067,000, Felipe Boianovsky was second for $2,131,000, and Dzivielevski filled out the all-Brazilian podium.

The current chapter began in February 2026. Across the PokerGO Tour Mixed Games Series and the Super High Roller Bowl Mixed Games that followed, Dzivielevski produced what poker journalist Paul Seaton, writing for TightPoker, described as one of the most dominant single weeks in modern poker. He won the PGT Mixed Games Series points race with $745,350 in earnings, then took down the $100,000 SHRB Mixed Games for $1,300,000 over a 38-entry field. The week added more than $2 million to his bankroll and put him over $11.7 million in tracked live earnings.

Key titles and biggest results

The following table lists Dzivielevski’s most significant verified results, sourced from Hendon Mob, WSOP.com, PokerNews, and CardPlayer:

Event	Year	Finish	Prize	Notes
Triton $150,000 8-Handed (WSOP Paradise)	2025	3rd	$1,409,000	Career-high live cash; all-Brazilian podium
SHRB $100,000 Mixed Games	2026	1st	$1,300,000	Largest career mixed-games cash; PGT title
WSOP $50,000 Poker Players Championship	2022	2nd	$895,614	Lost heads-up to Dan Cates
EPT Monte Carlo €25,000 Single Day High Roller	2022	1st	€448,515 (~$487,000)	First EPT title
WSOP Online $10,000 PLO Championship	2023	1st	$368,343	Fourth bracelet
WSOP Main Event $10,000 NLH	2019	28th	$261,430	Deepest Main Event run to date
WSOP $2,500 Mixed Omaha 8 / Stud 8	2019	1st	$213,750	First WSOP bracelet
WSOP Online $400 PLO	2020	1st	$221,557	Second bracelet
WSOP $1,500 H.O.R.S.E.	2023	1st	$207,678	Third bracelet
WSOP $3,000 Nine-Game Mix	2024	1st	$215,982	Fifth bracelet in five years
BSOP Grand Final R$10,000 Main Event	2015	1st	R$652,509 (~$175,155)	First major live title

What this record collectively says is that Dzivielevski is a tournament specialist with one foot planted in mixed games and the other in Pot-Limit Omaha. He is not a No-Limit Hold’em-first player who happens to play other variants — he is one of a handful of professionals globally for whom the mix is the main game. The four-year gap between his EPT High Roller win in 2022 and his SHRB win in 2026 also reveals a pattern: Dzivielevski cashes constantly, finals tables consistently, and converts wins in clusters when he runs into form. The 19 cashes and three final tables he posted across the 2024 WSOP summer alone are evidence of the volume that underwrites those clusters.

Playing style and strategic identity

Dzivielevski’s playing style cannot be summarised in a single label, partly because he plays so many different variants and partly because he has rebuilt his game multiple times. The pattern across formats, however, is consistent: he is a theory-heavy, selectively aggressive player whose decisions are built on solver work and a willingness to deviate from baseline strategies once he has read the table.

His own descriptions of his approach are unusually explicit. After his first bracelet in 2019, he explained to WSOP.com that he had built his final-table strategy around a tight default with selective, high-leverage aggression — applying chip-EV and ICM thinking from his No-Limit Hold’em background to a mixed-game environment where many opponents were navigating by feel. In a 2023 interview with GipsyTeam he made the same point about live high stakes in Las Vegas, observing that he saw consistent fundamental errors among opponents who were playing on intuition rather than from a base of theory.

Solver work is central to how he approaches every variant. He told GipsyTeam that he had paid £400-£500 per hour for one-on-one Pot-Limit Omaha coaching from a GTO-focused coach early in his transition to mixed games, and that the foundations of those lessons translated to limit games once he layered in additional study. He has been candid that the cost of that learning curve was high — he reported losing roughly 100 buy-ins early in his Pot-Limit Omaha grind before turning the format profitable around the eight-month mark.

The reputation he has among other professionals is that he is a complete player rather than a flashy one. His 2026 SHRB Mixed Games title came at a final table that included Hall of Famer Nick Schulman, eight-time bracelet winner Benny Glaser, and the defending champion Chad Eveslage. PokerNews described his three-handed and heads-up play as a 7:1 chip-lead conversion that was over within five minutes — efficient and methodical rather than dramatic. CardPlayer’s recap noted that he cleaned up two of the most accomplished mixed-game tournament players in the world inside thirty minutes once the final blocks fell into place.

The mental game is the part of his approach that most distinguishes him from his peers. He is a long-time meditator, and has spoken in multiple interviews about the importance of self-knowledge as a poker discipline. After his February 2026 SHRB win, he told CardPlayer that in 15 years, I’ve been through all types of runs — framing the win as a swing back the other way after the worst run of his career at the 2025 WSOP. His acceptance of variance, expressed publicly and consistently, is what has allowed him to maintain volume during downswings.

There is one quote of his that recurs in nearly every profile because it captures the engine behind everything else. Speaking to PokerGO’s Poker Central during the 2019 Poker Masters, Dzivielevski said I love the game of poker so much and described himself as fascinated by the mechanics of strategy, exploitation, and deviation. The volume he has put in across formats over the last fifteen years is the practical translation of that statement.

Online poker and cash games

Dzivielevski’s online career is the larger half of his record, and arguably the more important half. He is best known on PokerStars under the screen name “theNERDguy” — a handle that has won six World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) titles per PokerNews, with Wikipedia listing nine WCOOP titles when including his early 2015 win in the $1,050 PLO Hi/Lo Championship. His SCOOP record on PokerStars adds five further titles, the first in 2021. On GGPoker he plays as “Y Dzivielevski,” and has won two of his five WSOP bracelets in online events on that platform.

According to partypoker’s announcement of his sponsorship in December 2021, his online tournament earnings at the time of signing exceeded $14 million, the most of any player from South America. In October 2022, his PocketFives account was briefly reactivated and showed lifetime online tournament cashes of more than $18.3 million — a figure that placed him among the top ten online tournament players in history. The Hendon Mob’s separate online tracker, which uses PocketFives data, lists him at $7,728,583 in tracked online cashes as of March 2025; the gap between that figure and the partypoker number reflects how much of his online career was on platforms not currently tracked by PocketFives.

His most-cited online win remains the 2021 WCOOP-80-H, a $10,300 No-Limit Hold’em High Roller he took down for $265,918. He also won the 2020 partypoker MILLIONS Online $10,300 6-Max High Roller for $184,637, the result that effectively put him on the partypoker recruitment radar.

Dzivielevski has not been a regular fixture on the public high-stakes cash game scene — there is no documented record of him playing on Hustler Casino Live, Live at the Bike, or comparable streamed games. His live high-stakes presence is entirely tournament-driven, primarily through PokerGO Tour, Triton, and WSOP events. He has spoken about the harsh tax treatment of foreign tournament earnings in Brazil — a 2019 PokerGO interview noted that he was particularly motivated to play more US events in profitable years because losses elsewhere on the calendar could offset the headline tax bill.

Beyond the felt

Dzivielevski’s most prominent corporate relationship was his term as a partypoker ambassador, which ran from September 2021 to January 2023. PokerNews characterised the role as built around Twitch streaming and ambassador appearances; partypoker billed him as the first South American to head a recruitment push for online tournament players in the region. The relationship ended quietly in early 2023, with no public dispute reported. He has not signed a comparable deal since, although he continues to play heavily on GGPoker and PokerStars.

In Brazil, where his bracelet count and online numbers have made him one of the most recognisable poker figures of his generation, he is part of a broader cohort of pros — including Andre Akkari, Joao Simao, Felipe Boianovsky, Bruno Volkmann, and Pedro Garagnani — who together helped lift Brazil into the top ten countries by WSOP bracelets and the top three by total cashes during the 2010s and early 2020s. The World Poker Tour described him in a 2024 feature as the face of Brazilian poker; the more accurate framing is that he is one of the faces, and the only one with five bracelets.

He brought a videographer to the 2019 Poker Masters to document his shots in the high-roller world for Brazilian poker fans, telling Poker Central he was the first Brazilian player in the series and wanted to make the experience visible at home. He maintains an active social presence on Instagram (@yurinerdguy) and Twitter (@YuriNerdguy), where he has used his account both to celebrate results and to discuss training methodology — an unusually public window into a player’s craft for a top-tier pro.

There are no significant non-poker business ventures publicly attached to his name, and there is no published book or training site under his branding as of April 2026. The most personal detail he has shared in interviews concerns his motivation: he has consistently framed his decision to turn pro at 18 as an effort to help his parents, and has referenced the family-first frame in subsequent interviews about why he kept playing through downswings.

Current status and what to watch

Dzivielevski is at the peak of his career. As of late February 2026, he sits at $11,728,733 in live tournament earnings on Hendon Mob — second only to Joao Simao on the Brazilian all-time money list (per CardPlayer’s pre-SHRB tally of $17.4 million for Simao, although the gap between them narrowed materially with Dzivielevski’s $1.3 million February win). He leads the 2026 PokerGO Tour leaderboard by a wide margin, holds the SHRB Mixed Games title, and is ranked among the top mixed-games tournament players in the world by every measure that exists.

The story of the next twelve months will hinge on two things. The first is whether he can convert his February run into a full-year PGT Player of the Year campaign — a difficult ask given the schedule’s tilt toward No-Limit Hold’em and the strength of competitors like Andrew Lichtenberger. The second is whether he can finally claim a sixth bracelet at the 2026 WSOP. He came close in 2024 and again in 2025; the format-spanning consistency that has carried him this far suggests another high-volume summer with multiple deep runs is the most likely outcome. Watch the $50,000 Poker Players Championship — it is the trophy he has come closest to and has not yet won.

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