Neymar’s poker side bet is no hobby: more than a decade in the game and over R$ 2.4 million in winnings

Neymar has spent the last 12 years treating poker as something closer to a second discipline than a pastime. For high-risk payment teams, the useful bit is not the celebrity angle; it’s the fact that poker sits in the same operational bucket as other money-moving, high-volume, regulator-sensitive leisure verticals.

1. Neymar first discovered poker in 2014 while with the Brazilian national team and later took the game all the way to the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas, where he exited before the money zone. Over the years he also played the Brazilian Series of Poker (BSOP), the WSOP, and the European Poker Tour (EPT) in Barcelona.
2. The text says he became a PokerStars ambassador and has documented winnings of more than R$ 2.4 million. The exact total is not precise in the source, but the recorded profit figure is above that level.
3. His poker activity has tracked his football career almost step for step. In 2015, a few months after Barcelona won the Champions League, he appeared at the EPT alongside Gerard Piqué and began his partnership with PokerStars. After Brazil’s loss to Croatia at the 2022 World Cup, he used his break to play the WSOP.
4. The pace picked up again during recovery from the rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, suffered in October 2023. Since then, the source says he has made at least 20 public appearances across live and online events, including moments when family plans were paused so he would not miss an online tournament.
5. Rafael Moraes, CEO of the Brazilian Series of Poker and the first Brazilian to pass US$ 1 million in online winnings, says Neymar treats poker as a mental game he can study, train, and improve in. In Moraes’s view, football remains Neymar’s main passion, and poker became the second.

The BSOP, according to the source, brings together 20,000 to 30,000 players per season, which is the kind of volume that matters when you are thinking about payments, fraud controls, and operator liquidity in regulated and semi-regulated gaming flows.