Lex Veldhuis is a Dutch professional poker player and streaming pioneer who helped turn watching online poker into a form of live entertainment.
Veldhuis was already playing some of the biggest online poker games in the world before Twitch poker existed.
He later reinvented himself in front of an audience.
Known online as “RaSZi,” Veldhuis went from competitive StarCraft and high-stakes online poker to becoming one of the most successful poker streamers of his generation. His Twitch channel has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, while some of his biggest tournament runs have been watched live by tens of thousands of people.
His poker career has included high-stakes cash games, major online tournament victories, television appearances, a 17-year relationship with PokerStars and repeated attempts to win his first World Series of Poker bracelet.
In 2026, Veldhuis entered another new chapter.
He left PokerStars, returned to regular poker streaming as a free agent, moved with his family to Costa Rica and promptly produced his deepest WSOP finish in 17 years.
Who Is Lex Veldhuis?
Alexander Bastiaan Martin Veldhuis, better known as Lex Veldhuis, is a Dutch professional poker player, streamer and poker creator from Vlissingen in the Netherlands.
Before poker, there was StarCraft.
Veldhuis was a serious competitive gamer and became known within the StarCraft community under the name “RaSZi.”
That world would eventually lead him directly to poker.
Veldhuis became part of the early Team Liquid community and lived with Team Liquid founder Victor “Nazgul” Goossens. Goossens introduced him to poker as a game that could potentially be played for money.
Another important connection came through Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier.
Grospellier, who had also moved from professional gaming into poker, reportedly transferred $10 into Veldhuis’ PokerStars account in 2005.
Veldhuis began playing.
The $10 did not stay $10 for long.
From StarCraft to High-Stakes Online Poker
The move from competitive gaming to poker suited Veldhuis.
StarCraft required rapid decision-making, pattern recognition, studying opponents and processing large amounts of information under pressure.
Poker offered many of the same competitive attractions.
It also offered money.
Veldhuis progressed through the online cash-game stakes under the screen name “RaSZi,” eventually playing at levels most poker players never reach.
He became known for aggressive play, long sessions and a willingness to battle other elite online players.
The goal during that part of his career was simple.
Get as good as possible and get to the biggest games as quickly as possible.
Years later, Veldhuis would look back on that period rather differently.
He has spoken about taking unnecessary risks during his early career and eventually losing the ability to compete regularly in the very games he had worked so hard to reach.
That experience would become particularly important when his poker career changed direction again.
Lex Veldhuis’ Live Poker Career
Online poker made Veldhuis famous within the game, but television introduced him to a much wider audience.
He became particularly recognizable during the late 2000s poker boom.
Veldhuis appeared prominently during coverage of the 2009 World Series of Poker and developed a reputation as an aggressive player who was perfectly happy talking at the table.
He also appeared on major poker television shows including High Stakes Poker and PokerStars’ The Big Game.
These were not small games.
Veldhuis shared tables with some of the most recognizable players in poker, including figures such as Doyle Brunson and Phil Ivey.
His personality made him particularly suitable for televised poker.
While some players attempted to reveal as little as possible behind sunglasses and carefully controlled expressions, Veldhuis was often talking, laughing and engaging with the table.
There was serious poker underneath it.
Lex Veldhuis Reaches the 2009 WSOP Final Table
Veldhuis recorded the biggest live tournament cash of his career at the 2009 World Series of Poker.
The WSOP was celebrating its 40th anniversary and introduced a special $40,000 No Limit Hold’em event.
The enormous buy-in attracted a field filled with elite professional players.
Veldhuis reached the final table.
He eventually finished seventh for $277,939.
For the next 17 years, it remained his only WSOP final table.
That changed in 2026.
Lex Veldhuis Poker Earnings
Lex Veldhuis has more than $707,000 in recorded live tournament earnings.
His biggest recorded live results include:
- 7th, 2009 WSOP $40,000 40th Anniversary Event – $277,939
- 1st, 2010 Dutch Poker Open Main Event – approximately $86,000
- 31st, 2010 EPT Monte Carlo Grand Final – approximately $53,000
- 15th, 2011 EPT Sanremo Main Event – approximately $30,000
- 11th, 2011 WSOP $1,000 No Limit Hold’em – $28,517
Those numbers tell only a small part of the Lex Veldhuis poker story.
Much of his career has taken place online, where tournament databases such as Hendon Mob do not record his complete results.
Veldhuis has also played high-stakes online cash games and has recorded major online tournament scores worth six figures.
Recorded tournament cashes should not be confused with poker profit or net worth. They do not deduct tournament entries and do not include every online result, cash-game session, sponsorship payment, streaming income or other business activity.
Quick Facts
- Full name: Alexander Bastiaan Martin Veldhuis
- Known as: Lex Veldhuis
- Online nickname: RaSZi
- Born: December 29, 1983
- From: Vlissingen, Netherlands
- Nationality: Dutch
- Profession: Professional poker player and content creator
- Former game: Competitive StarCraft
- Twitch followers: Approximately 329,000 as of September 2026
- YouTube subscribers: Approximately 150,000 as of September 2026
- YouTube views: More than 52 million
- Recorded live tournament earnings: $707,000+
- Largest recorded live cash: $277,939
- Largest reported online MTT score: $172,793
- SCOOP titles: 1
- WCOOP titles: 1
- Former sponsor: PokerStars
- PokerStars partnership: Approximately 17 years
- Current status: Free agent
- Current home: Costa Rica
- Main content: Online tournaments, livestreams, poker analysis and community events
How Lex Veldhuis Became a Twitch Poker Pioneer
Veldhuis had already experienced one version of professional poker.
Streaming gave him another.
He began taking Twitch seriously around 2016, when poker streaming was still developing as a form of entertainment.
The format suited him unusually well.
A traditional poker television show showed selected hands after extensive editing.
Twitch showed everything.
A streamer could spend hours card dead, lose important pots, misplay hands, win tournaments, tilt, recover and explain decisions while thousands of people watched it happen in real time.
Veldhuis embraced that lack of filtering.
His existing poker experience also meant viewers were not simply watching somebody learn the game.
They were watching a player who had already competed in high-stakes online games and appeared on major poker television shows.
That combination helped his channel grow into one of the most important poker streams on Twitch.
The Night Lex Veldhuis Became No. 1 on Twitch
One night in May 2020 demonstrated how far poker streaming had come.
Veldhuis was deep in the $10,300 SCOOP Main Event on PokerStars.
As the tournament progressed, the audience grew.
And grew.
His stream eventually peaked at approximately 58,799 concurrent viewers.
For a period, Lex Veldhuis had the most-watched channel on the entire Twitch platform.
Not merely the biggest poker stream.
The biggest stream.
Veldhuis eventually finished 15th in the tournament for more than $62,000.
The result was significant. The audience was arguably even more important.
Poker had briefly occupied the top spot on one of the biggest live-streaming platforms in the world.
Lex Veldhuis’ Biggest Online Tournament Results
Veldhuis’ online results are considerably more important to understanding his career than his live tournament database.
In 2021, he recorded what he described as the biggest online tournament score of his career.
Veldhuis reached heads-up play in a $10,300 WCOOP Progressive Knockout High Roller against Yuri Dzivielevski.
Dzivielevski won the tournament.
Veldhuis collected $172,793 for second place.
It remains one of the defining tournament streams of his career.
Other major online results followed.
The biggest breakthrough, however, would arrive in 2024.
Lex Veldhuis Finally Wins a SCOOP Title
For years, Veldhuis had gone deep in major PokerStars Championship of Online Poker events without winning one.
That changed during SCOOP 2024.
He entered the $5,200 Titans event and navigated a 128-entry field featuring some of the strongest online tournament players in poker.
The final stages included opponents such as Patrick Leonard, Yuri Dzivielevski, Kahle Burns and Roman Romanovsky.
Veldhuis won.
The victory was worth $140,279 and gave him his first SCOOP title.
For a player whose streaming career had become so closely associated with PokerStars’ biggest online series, the victory meant considerably more than another tournament score.
He had finally won a COOP title live in front of his audience.
A few months later, he did it again.
First WCOOP Title Completes Huge 2024
Veldhuis entered the 2024 WCOOP having already won his first SCOOP title.
He then added his first WCOOP title.
Veldhuis won the $5,200 Bounty Builder Super High Roller for a total prize of approximately $130,081, including bounties.
He defeated Alexandros Theologis heads-up.
There was also a costume involved.
Veldhuis played the tournament while dressed as Ali G.
Poker can be very serious. It does not always need to look serious.
The victory completed a remarkable year in which Veldhuis won both his first SCOOP and first WCOOP titles.
Lex Veldhuis’ Most Popular Poker Video
BIGGEST ONLINE SCORE OF MY CAREER!!! WCOOP 2021
One of the most watched long-form poker videos on Veldhuis’ main YouTube channel follows his extraordinary 2021 WCOOP run.
The video covers his progress through the $10,300 Progressive Knockout High Roller before he eventually reaches heads-up play against Yuri Dzivielevski.
Veldhuis ultimately finishes second.
The consolation is considerable.
He collects $172,793, at the time the biggest online tournament score of his career.
The video captures what makes poker livestreaming different from a conventional tournament recap.
Viewers do not simply see the final result.
They see the pressure build as the payouts increase and one decision after another starts carrying enormous financial consequences.
Lex Veldhuis’ YouTube Channel
Twitch remains central to Veldhuis’ identity as a creator, but YouTube has become an extensive archive of his poker career.
His main channel had approximately 150,000 subscribers and more than 52 million views by September 2026.
The videos include tournament highlights, high-stakes online sessions, strategy discussion, major final tables and edited versions of memorable streams.
There are now more than 1,400 uploads on the channel.
For somebody who cannot watch an eight-hour Twitch session, YouTube provides a considerably easier way to follow the most important moments.
That includes the victories. It also includes the disasters.
Poker produces plenty of both.
Lex Live Takes the Community Offline
Veldhuis’ audience eventually became large enough that watching poker online was no longer the only way they interacted.
Lex Live was created to bring the community together in person. The concept was straightforward.
People who had spent months or years chatting with each other during Twitch streams could meet, play poker and turn online usernames into actual people.
The first Lex Live took place in Namur in 2019.
Further editions followed, including London, Barcelona and Bratislava.
The fourth edition took place at Banco Casino Bratislava in June 2025. The festival attracted hundreds of players and included a €200,000 guaranteed Main Event.
For Veldhuis, the attraction has always gone beyond simply putting his name on a tournament series.
The community came first.
That approach also connects him to creators such as Kevin Martin, whose careers developed alongside the growth of Twitch poker and demonstrated that audiences could become part of the poker experience rather than simply watching it.
17 Years With PokerStars Comes to an End
Few modern poker sponsorships lasted longer than the relationship between Lex Veldhuis and PokerStars.
Veldhuis represented the company for approximately 17 years.
During that period he evolved from high-stakes professional and television personality into one of PokerStars’ most recognizable streaming ambassadors.
Then the relationship ended.
In January 2026, Veldhuis announced that he had left PokerStars.
He did not immediately sign with another operator.
Instead, he described 2026 as a new chapter and returned to streaming poker while playing on GGPoker as a free agent.
The return produced an almost immediate result.
Veldhuis won a tournament during his first poker stream of the year.
After such a long association with a single poker brand, becoming independent represented a considerable change.
Veldhuis said he was in no hurry to enter another sponsorship agreement.
For the first time in years, the stream was simply Lex.
Why Lex Veldhuis Moved to Costa Rica
The changes went considerably further than a poker sponsorship.
Toward the end of 2024, Veldhuis and his family decided to take a sabbatical and travel in New Zealand.
The experience encouraged him to reconsider what he wanted from both poker and family life.
He has spoken openly about wanting to be a present father while still maintaining the competitive part of his career.
Eventually, the family moved to Costa Rica.
The move also created new possibilities for online poker.
Veldhuis could once again play major international online tournament schedules while structuring his life around his family and streaming career.
It did not take long for the poker results to follow.
Lex Veldhuis Comes Closer Than Ever to a WSOP Bracelet
Veldhuis began the 2026 WSOP Online series on GGPoker from Costa Rica.
He repeatedly went deep.
Through the opening 14 bracelet events, he cashed eight times. Then came the $1,500 Super Turbo Bounty Pot-Limit Omaha event.
The tournament attracted 721 entries.
Veldhuis reached the final seven.
It was his first WSOP final table since that $40,000 event in Las Vegas in 2009. Seventeen years had passed.
Veldhuis reached five-handed play and picked up pocket aces. The chips went in against the tournament chip leader.
His opponent had flopped a set. There was no comeback.
Veldhuis finished fifth for $41,466 including bounties.
It was his best WSOP finish ever by position and the closest Lex Veldhuis had come to winning his first WSOP bracelet.
The reaction was a mixture of disappointment and optimism. He was getting closer.
Why a WSOP Bracelet Still Matters to Lex Veldhuis
Veldhuis has already achieved things a bracelet cannot measure.
He played high-stakes online cash games before streaming existed. He represented PokerStars for almost two decades. He won SCOOP and WCOOP titles. He helped establish poker on Twitch and once became the most watched streamer on the entire platform. He created a live poker festival around his own community.
A WSOP bracelet is still missing.
And that matters to him.
After moving to Costa Rica, Veldhuis spoke openly about rediscovering his enthusiasm for the World Series.
Watching Daniel Negreanu document his WSOP summers had created what Veldhuis described as considerable FOMO.
Now he has the opportunity to chase bracelets again.
The fifth-place finish in September 2026 suggested that the chase may be rather more serious than nostalgia.
Beyond Poker
Veldhuis’ career has never been entirely limited to poker. Competitive gaming existed before the cards.
Video games have remained part of his Twitch content throughout his streaming career, particularly during periods when he has stepped away from regular poker broadcasts.
Family has also become increasingly important.
Veldhuis is married and has two children, and his decisions around travel, streaming and where to live have increasingly reflected that.
That makes the later stages of his career quite different from the young RaSZi trying to climb through online poker limits as quickly as possible.
The competitive streak remains. The priorities around it have changed.
Where to Watch Lex Veldhuis
Veldhuis remains one of the most established poker streamers online.
His Twitch channel is the best place to watch complete poker sessions, including major online tournament series.
YouTube provides shorter edited versions of those streams, tournament highlights and some of the biggest moments from his career.
Veldhuis also remains active on social media, where he posts streaming updates, poker results and information about upcoming events.
Where to Follow Lex Veldhuis
- Twitch: LexVeldhuis
- YouTube: Lex Veldhuis
- X: LexVeldhuis
- Instagram: lexveldhuis
Lex Veldhuis News
Lex Veldhuis FAQ
What is Lex Veldhuis’ real name?
Lex Veldhuis’ full name is Alexander Bastiaan Martin Veldhuis.
He is a Dutch professional poker player and streamer who is also known by his longtime online poker nickname, “RaSZi.”
Where is Lex Veldhuis from?
Veldhuis was born in Vlissingen, Netherlands, on December 29, 1983.
He later lived in other locations during his poker career and moved with his family to Costa Rica in 2026.
What does RaSZi mean?
RaSZi is the online nickname Veldhuis used during his competitive gaming and poker career.
He was already known by the name in the StarCraft community before becoming a prominent online poker player.
Was Lex Veldhuis a professional gamer?
Veldhuis competed seriously in StarCraft before his poker career.
His involvement in the gaming community introduced him to people including Victor Goossens and Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, connections that eventually helped lead him into online poker.
How much has Lex Veldhuis won playing poker?
Veldhuis has more than $707,000 in recorded live tournament earnings.
That figure does not include the majority of his online poker career, where he has recorded several major six-figure tournament results and previously played high-stakes cash games.
It should not be treated as his overall poker profit.
What is Lex Veldhuis’ biggest poker win?
His largest recorded live tournament cash is $277,939, earned for finishing seventh in the $40,000 WSOP 40th Anniversary Event in 2009.
His largest reported online tournament score is $172,793, earned for finishing second in a $10,300 WCOOP PKO High Roller in 2021.
Has Lex Veldhuis won a WSOP bracelet?
No.
Veldhuis has reached two WSOP final tables but has not yet won a bracelet.
He finished seventh in the $40,000 WSOP 40th Anniversary Event in 2009 and fifth in a $1,500 WSOP Online Super Turbo Bounty Pot-Limit Omaha event in September 2026.
Has Lex Veldhuis won SCOOP or WCOOP?
Yes.
Veldhuis won his first SCOOP title in May 2024, taking down the $5,200 Titans event for $140,279.
He added his first WCOOP title in September 2024, winning the $5,200 Bounty Builder Super High Roller for approximately $130,081 including bounties.
Is Lex Veldhuis still sponsored by PokerStars?
No.
Veldhuis left PokerStars in January 2026 after a relationship lasting approximately 17 years.
He returned to regular poker streaming as a free agent and began playing tournaments on GGPoker.
How many Twitch followers does Lex Veldhuis have?
Lex Veldhuis had approximately 329,000 Twitch followers in September 2026.
His channel has been one of the most influential poker channels on the platform. During a deep SCOOP Main Event run in May 2020, his stream peaked at almost 59,000 concurrent viewers and briefly became the most watched channel on all of Twitch.
