The Six Most Intriguing Players at the 2025 WSOP
These six players each have the potential to grab their share of the winnings and the spotlight over the next seven weeks.
For the 51 days of the 2025 World Series of Poker, poker fans around the world will be glued to live updates, chip counts, live streams, and social media chatter coming out of Las Vegas. Inevitably each year, a number of players rise above the rest by putting on performances, not necessarily in a single event, but in multiple tournaments over the duration of the WSOP, that push them into the spotlight on poker’s grandest stage.
Whether it’s the defending Player of the Year threatening to take the crown again this year or a once highly-hyped young gun finally putting on a Series to remember or a sleeper pick for WSOP Player of the Year, these are the six most intriguing players heading into the 2025 WSOP.
Scott Seiver
Had this list existed in 2024, it’s highly unlikely that Scott Seiver would have been on it. He tends to focus his attention on high stakes cash games in the summer months and hasn’t been one to chase poker glory or WSOP bracelets. That all changed last year when he showed up at the WSOP and turned it into the ‘Summer of Seiver’ rattling off three WSOP bracelet wins, 13 live cashes, four online cashes, nearly $1.5 million in earnings, and topped it off with a WSOP Player of the Year title.
So now he’s heading into the 2025 WSOP and apparently feeling pretty confident, maybe even borderline cocky. In April, a day after turning 40, Seiver threw down the gauntlet and offered people the opportunity to bet against winning a bracelet this summer. Seems pretty likely that he’s ready to put the cash games aside for another summer and be back grinding. He’s apparently not the only one feeling that way. One poker writer predicted Seiver will enjoy another three bracelet summer this year.
Having just turned 40, he’s also now eligible for the Poker Hall of Fame. The only other poker player to have seven or more WSOP bracelets that isn’t in the PHOF is Men Nguyen and uh, well, he’s just never getting in. If Seiver adds an eighth bracelet before PHOF voters decide on this year’s inductees - about ⅔ of the way into the Series - could make voters decisions either extremely difficult or extremely easy.
Bryce Yockey
Bryce Yockey has a pair of WSOP bracelets, winning his first in 2019 ($10K PLO8) and then picking up his second last year ($5K PLO). Even with those two accolades on his resume, Yockey is probably best remembered by poker fans for being on the wrong end of one of, if not THE, worst bad beat in WSOP history in the 2019 WSOP $50,000 Poker Players Championship.
Part of what makes Yockey so intriguing is that that moment, which one a Global Poker Award for Hand of the Year, (and the one from last summer where he was on the wrong-end of a rivered straight flush) actually overshadows the fact that he has made the final table of that event twice in his career. He finished fourth in that 2019 event and then came in second to Daniel Negreanu last year. Two final tables inside of a five-year window in the event that some poker pros consider to be the real poker world championship is nothing to sneeze at.
Despite the fact that he has never finished in the top ten of the WSOP POY race, Yockey might just somehow be a WSOP Player of the Year sleeper pick. Along with the two bracelet wins and PPC final tables, Yockey cashed nine times in live events and eight times in online events at the 2024 WSOP and has cashes in a number of mixed game formats. He’s also a regular in PokerGO Tour events, playing bigger buy-in events against the tough players that frequent those. While the likes of Negreanu, Shaun Deeb, Josh Arieh, and Seiver are most likely the POY betting favorites, Yockey might just be the best value on the board - wherever he lands.
Yuri Dzivielevski
Yuri Dzivielevski is the biggest challenger to Phil Hellmuth’s WSOP bracelet record. Full stop. Yes, the Brazilian has only five bracelets of his own, but those five wins came in the last six years. The 33-year-old won his first bracelet in 2019 and then picked up a win in 2020, a pair in 2023, and last summer added his fifth. He came close to adding a sixth too. He cashed 19 times across live and online events last summer, including three final tables.
While there are other players who may one day end up challenging Hellmuth’s record, Dzivielevski has a leg up simply because he plays every single game offered on the WSOP schedule at a high level and puts in a tremendous amount of volume every summer. The proof is in the numbers. Of his five bracelets, two are in Pot Limit Omaha and the others are all a different variation of mixed games: Mixed Omaha 8/Stud 8 (2019), HORSE (2023), and Nine Game Mix (2024).
He’s also extremely consistent. In each of the last five years that WSOP awarded Player of the Year points (excluding 2020 which was canceled due to Covid), Dzivielevski has finished in the top 100 in points earned. Only four other players have done that and none won more than two bracelets during that time frame. Nobody - not his peers or poker fans - should be too surprised if Dzivielevski adds more than one bracelet to his tally this summer.
Noel Rodriguez
There were three players who had two runner-up finishes at the 2024 WSOP. Adam Owen, Robert Wells, and Noel Rodriguez. None were more surprising than Rodriguez though. Prior to last summer, the California grinder had never cashed in an event with a buy-in above $10,400, instead focusing on the mid-stakes events up and down the California coast.
Then he took a stab at the 2023 WPT World Championship in Las Vegas and walked out with a then career-high score of $236,300 for coming in 19th place. Having shown he can play bigger buy-in, big field events, Rodriguez rolled into the 2024 WSOP with both his confidence and bankroll booming. After picking up five small cashes in the first two weeks of the Series, Rodriguez picked up his first runner-up finish in the $25,000 NLHE High Roller, losing to Nick Schulman, but won $1,111,897 in the process. Just over two weeks later, he outlasted 1,771 other players in the $3,000 NLHE event, only to lose heads-up to Paolo Boi.
He wasn’t done there though. He was back in Las Vegas in December for the WPT World Championship and found himself grabbing another podium finish in a big buy-in event finishing in third place in the $25,800 buy-in Alpha8 event for $345,488.
He has lifetime earnings of $3.4 million with 56% of that coming in the last 11 months. Despite this, the 29-year-old is still looking for a signature win to truly mark his breakthrough into poker stardom. Earlier this month he made the final table of the WSOP Circuit Main Event at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles but fell in 5th place and he heads into the WSOP with some positive momentum. If he can harness that and re-capture some of the magic he had last year he may wind up with a bracelet around his wrist.
João Vieira
There was a time not that long ago when some of his peers considered João Vieira one of the top two or three best all-around players in the world. He is probably still in that conversation, but his 2024 WSOP results wouldn’t show it - and that’s exactly why he’s on this list.
After finishing 21st in the 2019 WSOP POY race, 13th in the 2021 WSOP POY race, sixth in 2022, and 19th in 2023, Vieira didn’t even crack the top 100 in 2024. He managed to cash just seven times and made only one final table, finishing sixth in the $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha event. It was an uncharacteristic performance to say the least.
He has three WSOP bracelets to his name already, and while each is in No Limit Hold’em, he also plays Mixed Games. He’s made WSOP final tables in Short Deck, HORSE, Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw, Pot Limit Omaha, Limit Hold’em, Seven–card Stud Hi-Lo and has cashed in 8 Game, Dealer’s Choice, Razz, and the Poker Players Championship.
The 2025 WSOP might just become the João Vieira Revenge Tour. The former professional basketball player has talked about how his athletic background has helped him in his professional poker career and it may just allow him to make to get back to his winning ways at the WSOP this summer.
Viktor Blom
If you look at Viktor Blom’s list of WSOP results in his career, you’re left with more questions than answers. The Swede had zero WSOP results from 2012 through 2022 and then turned up in Las Vegas to record three in-the-money finishes in 2023. Last summer was a totally different story.
He cashed 10 times - a career high - and made three final tables with a pair of third place finishes serving as the highlight. He walked away with $2,707,594 - impressive considering that his career WSOP earnings are just $2,945,183.
Blom has seemingly held the label of phenom since bursting on the scene playing nosebleed cash games online and has managed to find ways to add to the legend surrounding his prowess at the table ever since. In 2012, Blom finished 14th in the $50,000 Poker Players Championship at the WSOP after, according to Daniel Negreanu, learning the rules to the Stud games only a few days before the event began.
It’s not clear why exactly Blom treated the 2024 WSOP so differently than previous years, but his progression from 2023 to 2024 shows that he’s clearly putting more focus on playing bracelet events than ever before. Assuming he plays a similar schedule to 2024 - or maybe even an expanded one - there’s a good chance that the experience and success of 2024 will bear fruit with even deeper runs and his first career WSOP bracelet.
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