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Home / Lex Veldhuis: All you need to know about the Twitch superstar

As the biggest Twitch streamer in poker and an essential member of PokerStars Team Pro for over a decade, Lex Veldhuis is undoubtedly one of the most recognisable figures in the poker world.

From online cash game phenom to a seat on High Stakes Poker, PLO crusher to Twitch tournament triumph, he remains at the very top of the game.

So who better to learn from than Lex?

If you want to take your poker game to the next level, Check out Learn with Lex over on PokerStars Learn, where Lex is creating educational poker content explaining his recommended strategies in a way that’s easy to understand and digest.

PokerStars Learn is an online training site that lets you start playing poker for fun while learning the basics and getting to grips with strategies. The best part? It’s all completely free.

In this article, you’ll find all you need to know about Lex Veldhuis, from how he got started in poker to his biggest wins.


LEX VELDHUIS

BIO
ARTICLES
BIGGEST RESULTS
TWITCH HIGHLIGHTS


LEX VELDHUIS BIOGRAPHY

Alexander “Lex” Veldhuis was born in 1983 in Vlissingen, a harbour city in the southwestern Netherlands. Competitive from the get-go, Veldhuis took to sports like a duck to water and also developed a love of computer games at a young age, eventually moving from Nintendo to more complex, strategy-driven games like Starcraft.

Lex Veldhuis

It was in Starcraft that Veldhuis would find his first success. Under the name ‘RaSZi’, he became well known in the gaming world and eventually joined the now esteemed Team Liquid in 2004. During this time, he was roommates with Victor “Nazgul” Goossens, a former professional StarCraft: Brood War player and Team Liquid’s founder and co-owner. It was Goossens who first introduced Veldhuis to poker.

“He told me that he’d found a game I could play for money,” Veldhuis said. “This was back when I was 18, 19
 I had just moved out of the house. I was looking for a job on the side to pay rent. He told me to check it out. I started out playing with fictional money to get used to the rules and strategy behind it.”

It was around this time that Veldhuis met StarCraft legend and former PokerStars Team Pro Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, who deposited $10 into Veldhuis’ PokerStars account in 2005. From there, he built his bankroll from the ground up. Perhaps due to his competitive gaming background, he was a natural and used his prowess in strategy games to reach the highest stakes online.

A fresh-faced Lex Veldhuis battles against a fresh-faced Justin Bonomo while a fresh-faced Doyle Brunson looks on (The Big Game, 2010)

The man known as RaSZI became a legend in the poker world, known for playing long hours and huge sessions. Veldhuis would soon gain even more notoriety when he began playing live poker tournaments and was featured heavily in the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event coverage on ESPN. That same year, he finished seventh in a $40K buy-in WSOP event for $278K. This led to appearances on some of poker’s greatest cash game TV shows including High Stakes Poker and PokerStars’ The Big Game, as well as a Team Pro sponsorship deal with PokerStars.

Lex was an online poker legend

While Lex continued to crush the online cash games, he also had a lot of success in online tournaments, winning the prestigious Sunday Million on PokerStars for $130K.

But it was Pot Limit Omaha cash games that became Veldhuis’ bread and butter, and for several years he focused solely on them. After a while, though, he began looking for a new way to refuel his passion for poker.

Veldhuis began streaming PLO cash games on Twitch.

“I was playing $2.50/$5 and I’d have a $1,500 stack and it was pretty exciting,” he said. “No one was playing cash games that high on Twitch. But people would come in the chat and ask me to play the Big $22! I was really surprised.

“But I realised tournaments are really nice to watch. It’s the whole start to victory that viewers care about. With cash games sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. But with tournaments, you can live through somebody when you watch them win a tournament. Tournaments have more crossover to video games too”

As tournaments were not his speciality, Veldhuis decided to learn them the right way. Instead of buying straight into bigger games that his bankroll could afford, he dropped down in stakes and worked his way up.

The rest is history. Veldhuis would soon become the number one poker streamer on the entire Twitch platform–a position he holds to this day–and he now battles regularly at the high stakes against the best tournament players in the world.

Lex is the biggest poker streamer in the world

He’s broken Twitch poker records and became the most-watched channel on the entire Twitch platform. He’s had several six-figure scores. But perhaps most importantly to Veldhuis, he’s built a loyal community of people who regularly tune in to hang out with him and each other while sweating the tournament action.

In March 2019, Veldhuis organised the first Lex Live event in Namur, Belgium. Community members from around the world came together for a week of poker, hang-outs and good times. Lex Live 2 followed in October 2019, this time taking place in London. It was even bigger and better.

For Veldhuis, the sky is the limit. Make sure you tune in to Lex Veldhuis on Twitch to find out what’s coming next.


LEX VELDHUIS ARTICLES

LEX BREAKS TWITCH POKER RECORDS AND HITS NO.1 ON ALL OF TWITCH

In May 2020, Lex Veldhuis’ Twitch channel became the most-viewed channel on the entire Twitch platform. This was unheard of for a poker stream at the time. The event he was streaming was the $10K Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) Main Event. The stakes were super high, with more than a million for first. And the viewers flocked in their thousands, with 58,799 people tuning in at once.

LEX LIVE 2: THE LEX INTERVIEW

Throughout his years of Twitch streaming, Lex Veldhuis has built one of the most loyal, friendly and supportive communities around. Don’t believe us? Just look at the success of the Lex Live events, which bring people together from around the world for a weeklong poker festival, allowing online friends to meet in real life. The first event took place in Namur Belgium back in March 2019, with Lex Live 2 taking place in London later that year in October.

TURBO TALK: LEX VELDHUIS

Get to know Lex Veldhuis a little better as he answers a series of rapid-fire questions.


LEX VELDHUIS BIGGEST RESULTS

ONLINE ON POKERSTARS:

$130,000 – 1st in $215 Sunday Million

$172,800 – 2nd in $10,300 WCOOP PKO High Roller

$97,257 – 4th in $5,200 Blowout Series High Roller Side Event

$96,144 – 1st in $2,100 Stadium Series Event

$91,695 – 2nd in $2,100 WCOOP Event

$80,646 – 3rd in $10,300 SCOOP Thursday Thrill PKO

$62,799 – 2nd in $2,100 SCOOP Event

$62,620 – 15th in $10,300 SCOOP Main Event

LIVE:

$277,939 – 7th in $40,000 WSOP 40th Anniversary Event

€61,200 – 1st in €1,050 Dutch Poker Open Main Event


LEX VELDHUIS TWITCH HIGHLIGHTS

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