Neymar Jr. Enjoys Playing High Stakes Poker While He Recovers From Surgery

Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. posted a photo of himself playing poker on PokerStars to his Instagram story.

The Brazilian superstar - who became the most expensive footballer in the world after his current club, the French Paris Saint-Germain, paid €222 million to Barcelona for his transfer - is currently healing from a foot injury. He’s spending his newly found downtime well, however - grinding it out at a table on PokerStars.

On March 11th, he posted this picture to his Instagram story for his over 90 million followers to see.

As we can tell by the bar on the top of the screen, Neymar was playing the $215 buy-in $1 million GTD SUNDAY MILLION tournament last weekend, under the screenname “neymar-jr”. After searching in the PS lobby, we quickly uncovered that he busted early, then re-bought and actually made it in the money - he finished 474th out of the 5,008 entries and won $559.71.

Neymar is no stranger to the biggest online poker room though, he was a member of their Team Sports Stars ambassadors until the ties were severed last April, and comedian Kevin Hart was brought in for the new advertisement campaigns - later, Hart was joined by a great athlete once again, Olympic gold medalist sprinter Usain Bolt. 

During his stint for Stars, Neymar took part in their #RaiseIt campaign for which he produced videos competing in challenges against other football greats, such us his fellow Brazilian soccer star, Ronaldo Luís Nazário.

Neymar dabbled in live poker as well, he played a tournament in the 2016 World Series of Poker; a year later, during the 2017 WSOP he played a private live Sit&Go with two Brazilian professional poker player friends of his, Andre Akkari and Felipe “Mojave” Ramos.

Neymar isn’t the only professional athlete who is known to be an avid poker player, 6-time Grand Slam winning German former tennis pro Boris Becker has over $100,000 in live tournament cashes; Dutch field hockey player Fatima de Melo is a Team PokerStars players; and 3-time Super Bowl champion, former Patriots defensive end Richard Seymour has multiple WSOP ITM finishes to his name.