The French professional poker player known as ElkY – a member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board – has announced his departure from the ranks of GGPoker ambassadors.
As evidenced by his pinned and most recent tweets, below, ElkY, aka Bertrand Grospellier, spent almost five years flying the flag for GGPoker after separate stints wearing the patches of partypoker and PokerStars.
His departure from GGPoker follows several unrelated ambassadorial shake-ups in 2025, including Jonathan ‘Apestyles’ Van Fleet leaving WPT Global and Ari Engel moving on from Phenom Poker – both in the past few weeks.
The StarCraft player with star appeal
ElkY made his name – literally – in his days before poker, when he was an elite StarCraft player based in Korea. Having achieved fame in the local, then global StarCraft scene, Grospellier adopted a pseudonym which would be easier for Korean fans to pronounce, and has stuck with the moniker of ‘ElkY’ ever since.
His switch in focus from real-time strategy (RTS) games to poker took place around 20 years ago, and the quick reactions and near-instant decision-making skills he’d honed in the high pressure world of competitive RTS gaming served him well in the online poker streets.
ElkY became the first player to achieve the rank of ‘Supernova’ at PokerStars – earning 100,000 frequent player points in just one month – and then the first to achieve ‘Supernova Elite’ by earning 1,000,000 points in 12 months.
ElkY repping GGPoker at the 2022 WSOP.
Success at the live tables came soon after, with a win at the 2008 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) followed by a WPT victory later that same year. In 2009 he returned to the PCA and claimed the High Roller title, then won two World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) titles at PokerStars within days of each other.
A Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) title followed in 2011, the same year he picked up his first World Series of Poker (WSOP) winner’s bracelet in the $10K Seven Card Stud Championship.
His love for e-sports doesn’t seem to have left him, however, and during his tenure as a PokerStars Team Pro he spent several years also competing in the strategy game Hearthstone as a member of Team Liquid.
He remains closely affiliated with the team, though appears to have been more focused on poker in recent years. His last tournament win came almost a year ago in a no-limit hold’em event at APT Taipei, in a victory worth over $367K.
ElkY tasted victory in Taipei just last year.
Another deal in the offing?
Having now represented many of the biggest online poker operators in the world, is Grospellier done with poker sponsorship, or will we see the man with the iconic blonde hair and shades flying under the banner of a new sponsor?
Crypto-based poker platform Phenom Poker has dropped a not-so-subtle signal that it may be open to discussions…
Additional images courtesy of the APT