Dzmitry Urbanovich came out of nowhere when he was just 19 years old when we won four titles at EPT Malta in March 2015, including the €25k High Roller Event for over $605k as well as a second-place finish in the EPT Grand Final €100k Super High Roller Event for $1.6 million. He also added another $632k by winning the €5k main event in EPT Dublin and $650k by finishing second in the EPT Barcelona €50k High Roller Event. Before he was even 21 years old, Urbanovich had earned nearly $5 million in live tournament winnings and was already at the top of Poland’s all-time leading money winners.
Urbanovich discovered poker when he was only 6 six years old, watching it on TV any chance he got. He was fascinated by the game even though he didn’t really understand it yet. At the age of 13, he created an online poker account under an older relative’s name to take advantage of a free $50 promotion. Within a few short days, he was busto. But Urbanovich decided he would give it another try, registering a new account in a different name. And another, and another, and another. He wasn’t winning but he was learning.
Eventually the free bankrolls dried up and he moved over to Full Tilt and started playing freerolls. For over a year, he mostly played freerolls and the lowest buy-in tournaments. He was studying many hours per day and finally everything began to click. He started playing all formats, from hold’em to razz to triple draw. He played cash games, SNGs and large field tournaments. And if he wasn’t playing, he was studying.
When Urbanovich finished high school, he moved from Belarus to Poland to study computer science at Łódź University. He did very well but ended up losing motivation by his second year as poker gained a more important role in his life. Urbanovich was improving so much and his results were so good that he decided to quit school to focus solely on poker.
Urbanovich eventually met up with Piotr Franczak at the EPT in London that started a friendship that soon developed into a online Facebook group known as the Silent Sharks with the sole focus of promoting poker in Poland. Other notable members included Przemyslaw Piotrowski, Jose Carlos Garcia, Jaroslaw Sikora, Kacper “JOKER” Pyzara, as well as Polish rapper Wojciech Łozowski. The group is still running strong and currently has over 9,200 members.
When he’s at home, Urbanovich says he likes to party every day. But when he’s on the tournament circuit, it’s all business with his focus solely on poker. Once he was of legal age to play the WSOP in Las Vegas, his summer was booked. It was there he met Vanessa Selbst who he ended up making a prop bet with.
It was 4am and we were drunk. I don’t remember how it started exactly but she said she’d give me 50-to-1 odds that I wouldn’t win three bracelets.
Eventually, they settled on odds of 200-to-1 with Urbanovich putting up $10,000. That meant if he could somehow win three bracelets during the 2016 World Series of Poker, he’d win an extra $2 million from Selbst. Urbanovich came up short however and lost $10,000 but said the bet provided enough motivation throughout the summer to give it his all.
And just recently, the 22-year-old Urbanovich signed on with PartyPoker as a sponsored pro, joining featured players Mike Sexton, Tony Dunst, Sam Trickett and Johnny Lodden. Here is what he had to say about his new deal:
I can’t wait to join the PartyPoker team. I have already played PartyPoker Million Sochi and MILLIONS and absolutely loved the events. There are so many great PartyPoker LIVE events that I’ll struggle to fit them all in. I am also planning my schedule for the online $20,000,000 Powerfest that starts on May 7, which I am sure will be a great success.
We here at BPC wish him all the best and will be rooting for him on the 2017 tournament circuit. You too can stay up to date with Urbanovich by following him on Twitter.
