While PokerStars Team Pro seems to be thinning with each week passing, the case is exactly the opposite with its rival poker operator partypoker and its team of sponsored players. It was announced earlier today that German poker Philipp Gruissem has become the latter poker room’s newest brand ambassador.

The player is joining a growing team of sponsored players, which includes fellow countryman Fedor Holz, among a number of others.

With live tournament earnings of over $11 million, Gruissem is one of his homeland’s most successful poker professionals. And here it is important to note once again that over the past several years, Germany has turned into a superpower in the world of poker thanks to its players who have been dominating high roller fields for the past several years.

Gruissem, in particular, has been quite active on the high roller scene and has taken down an impressive amount of such tournaments, hence his bankroll. The player won his largest cash namely from a high roller event. Back in 2013, he topped the field of the WPT Alpha 8 London £100,000 No-Limit Hold’em, good for £862,400.

A year later, the German took down the EPT Season 10 Grand Final €25,500 High Roller 8-Max for another massive payout of €993,963. The player won the same event in 2017, this time for €485,135. Overall, he has cashed in 54 live tournaments over the course of his poker career, and as it can be seen some of his payouts have been quite impressive.

Gruissem has also been playing online for quite some time. In fact, the player has revealed that he won his first ever online tournament on partypoker under the ‘philbort’ screen name. He has also pointed out that it was this victory (which brought him $200) that encouraged him to learn more about the game and delve deeper into its particularities.

As mentioned earlier, the online poker room has expanded its Team partypoker significantly over the past two years, signing poker heavyweights such as Fedor Holz, Jason Koon, Dzmitry Urbanovich, and Kristen Bicknell, and now Gruissem.

On the other hand, PokerStars Team Pro, the team of sponsored players of partypoker’s rival online poker brand, has lost some of its big names. In fact, four players have parted ways with PokerStars since the beginning of the year, with those being Vanessa Selbst, Jason Mercier, Felipe Ramos, and most recently Bertrand Grospellier.

While the players have cited different reasons for their departure, it can be said that many of them have probably decided to end their contracts with the poker room, due to the wave of changes in its rewards program it has been rolling out for the past two years or so. Generally speaking, these changes are aimed at attracting recreational players while poker professionals consider them less friendly.

Isaac Haxton has been one of the most vocal critics of PokerStars’ new policies. The player was part of the poker brand’s Team Pro, but severed ties with it in early 2016, claiming that it had behaved “unethically”. It was announced last week that Haxton has too joined Team partypoker as ambassador for the poker operator.

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