Bertrand Grospellier Signs With Professional eSports Website

Before Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier was a professional poker player, he was one of the best StarCraft players in the world, with his accolades including a 2nd place finish at the World Cyber Games in 2001, and victory at the Euro Cyber Games in 2003. Soon after, the Frenchman turned his attention towards the game of poker, and is currently ranked 16th on poker’s ‘All Time Money List’ with almost $11 million in live career earnings, as well as having won a further $1,774,488 online playing under the screen name ElkY.
The 34 year-old has been a member of Team PokerStars Pro for several years now, but the lines separating iPoker and eSports just became a little more blurred recently, after Grospellier signed with Team Liquid as a professional Hearthstone player. Team Liquid (TL) is an eSports website that sponsors professional players across a range of popular games, including Counter Strike: Global Offensive, StarCraft II, Dota 2, Halo, and, of course, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
The latest deal means Bertrand Grospellier now becomes the first person to be sponsored as both a poker and a gaming pro, while the new deal also helps to build further bridges between the increasingly converging worlds of poker and eSports. Recently, Grospellier even took on Daniel Negreanu in a Hearthstone exhibition match at the BlizzCon 2015 convention, after which he expressed a desire to one day compete at the Hearthstone World Championships. Grospellier will now get his wish, although he will have to polish up his Hearthstone game first. Not only did he lose his best of five exhibition match against Negreanu, but also his opening two matches as a member of Team Liquid. We cannot judge him too harshly, though, as one of the matches was against the current Hearthstone World Champion Sebastian “Ostkaka” Engwall.
On the Team Liquid website, Bertrand ‘ElkY’ Grospellier’s name now appears under the roster of sponsored players for ‘Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft’, a list which also includes Finlands Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen, Ukraine’s Eugene “Neirea” Shumilin, Sweden’s Jeffrey “SjoW” Brusi, and USA’s David “Dog” Caero.