Andre Akkari Moves into Brazil’s Top-Five Live Poker Winners of All Time

(Sponsored) In recent years, 49-year-old Brazilian poker professional Andre Akkari has inched his way up Brazil’s all-time poker earnings list.

By the end of 2023, Akkari had moved into the country’s top-five live poker winners in the game’s history.

The São Paulo-born Akkari enjoyed more success in last year’s biggest live poker events.

Akkari started his 2023 poker schedule with an appearance in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) Main Event in Nassau.

He cashed in the tournament, finishing in 61st place. Akkari would go on to build on this by cashing three separate times during the 2023 World Series of Poker (WSOP).

He came within a whisker of final tabling Event 35 in the Secret Bounty event, eventually becoming the so-called “bubble” in tenth place.

His third and final WSOP cash last year came in the prestigious H.O.R.S.E. event, which is a tournament reserved only for highly skilled poker players.

That’s because H.O.R.S.E. is a game consisting of rounds of play that cycle through five different poker formats.

These formats include Razz, Seven Card Stud, Omaha, and Texas Hold’em. Omaha is derived from Texas Hold’em, except each player is dealt four hole cards rather than two, which is usually the case in Texas Hold’em.

They must use half of these to build their best five-card poker hand, with the other three taken from the community cards dealt face-up to the table.

Akkari’s biggest achievement and result in the 2023 live poker circuit came just a month or so after his WSOP exploits. This time, Akkari finally tabled in the Main Event at the Barcelona leg of the European Poker Tour (EPT).

His fifth-place finish generated Akkari’s six-figure payout. Akkari’s achievement is even more impressive when you consider that the Brazilian was short-stacked for the tournament’s first three days – a serious poker grind.

He finished off his 2023 live poker schedule with a return to his motherland, competing in the Brazilian Series of Poker (BSOP) Millions’ 1-Day High Roller event in São Paulo, finishing a highly respectable 14th.

The city is better known for its football club, which has been planning to renovate its Morumbi Stadium for some time, but Akkari and co. are certainly raising its poker profile.

Charting Andre Akkari’s rise to poker stardom

Akkari is one of a handful of Brazilian poker pros to put the game on the map. The 49-year-old used to work in the animation industry, specializing in Flash visuals, powered by the now-defunct Adobe plugin.

It wasn’t until Akkari was given a brief to develop a Flash-powered e-commerce solution for a prospect in the poker industry that he was even aware of the concept of the game.

It didn’t take him long to download his first online poker client and delve deeper into poker’s dynamics.

After some time on the play money tables, Akkari made his first real-money deposit and started to play seriously in his spare time online.

He would go on to enroll in some of the biggest live poker events on the Latin American poker circuit, bagging high-profile tournament wins in 2010 and 2017 respectively.

Akkari has since developed a head of strategy at the poker tables, with his ability to master a handful of poker variants, alongside his first love of No Limit Texas Hold’em.

Other Brazilian poker players in the top five

At the top of Brazil’s all-time money list, Yuri Martins Dzivielevski stands proudly as the number-one Brazilian in live poker.

Like Akkari, Dzivielevski has also enjoyed big success in the WSOP. In fact, he’s got three WSOP bracelets to his name thus far.

He won his first bracelet in 2019, followed by another online win in 2020 and a third in 2023’s H.O.R.S.E. event which saw Akkari finish 16th.

Just behind Dzivielevski is Bruno Volkmann, who used to be a tennis player before becoming a poker professional.

The doubles tennis specialist has since branched out into the world of poker, where he’s excelled for several years now.

In 2019, Volkmann landed a BSOP title in the Super High Roller event. He’s since followed that up with a string of impressive results in the Triton Series, racking up serious cashes at events held in Cyprus, Madrid, and London.

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