Masato Yokosawa: The World’s Most Popular Poker Player?

If you were asked to guess whose Hendon Mob profile is attracting the most attention right now, Daniel Negreanu or one of the game’s high-stakes superstars might seem like the obvious answer.

You would be wrong.

At the top of The Hendon Mob’s current Popular Players ranking is Japanese pro Masato Yokosawa.

His profile has recorded 11,952 unique views over the past 30 days, putting him ahead of Bryn Kenney, Adrian Mateos and Daniel Negreanu. Yokosawa also leads the seven-day ranking.

And this is not a short-lived spike. Across the whole of 2025, his profile was comfortably the most viewed on the database, finishing the year with 222,758 views.

Yet outside Asia, Yokosawa may still not be a household name among casual poker fans. In Japan, however, the picture is very different. He is simultaneously a professional poker player, a YouTuber with an audience of more than one million subscribers, an entrepreneur and one of the most influential figures behind Japan’s ongoing poker boom.

So who exactly is Masato Yokosawa?

Born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1992, Yokosawa did not use internet fame as a springboard into professional poker. In fact, it happened the other way around.

The international poker community first had reason to notice his name in 2013. At just 21 years old, Yokosawa won the inaugural WPT Korea Main Event on Jeju Island. He defeated a 137-entry field, collected $100,000 and earned a place in the WPT Champions Club.

Over the following years, he regularly travelled abroad to play tournaments, gradually adding results from the Aussie Millions, Asian Poker Tour, EPT and eventually the WSOP to his résumé.

The biggest turning point in his career, however, did not come at the poker table.

In 2017, Yokosawa launched his YouTube channel 世界のヨコサワ, commonly known in English as “World Wide Yokosawa.”

The concept is essentially built around documenting his life: overseas casinos, major tournaments, high-stakes cash games and the lifestyle of a travelling professional poker player.

Over time, the channel expanded far beyond Japan’s core poker community. In August 2025, it passed one million subscribers, making Yokosawa one of the biggest poker vloggers in the world.

A key part of its success is that his videos are not primarily strategy content. Instead, viewers experience the poker lifestyle alongside him, including both the huge wins and the painful losses.

In a 2024 interview, Yokosawa offered a fairly simple explanation for why he enjoys making videos. He likes the attention, but even more importantly, he enjoys sharing the emotions of poker with his audience. When he wins big, viewers can celebrate with him. When he loses heavily, they get to experience that side of the game too.

His popularity within the wider poker community was recognised when he received the fan-voted Poker Personality award at the Global Poker Awards for his work in 2021.

For years, there was a reasonable question surrounding Yokosawa: was he primarily a successful poker content creator who also played professionally, or a genuinely elite international player?

His results over the past few years have increasingly pointed towards the latter.

At the 2023 WSOP Main Event, Yokosawa navigated a field of 10,043 entries to finish 45th for $188,400. A year later, he reached the final table of the $5,300 NAPT Las Vegas Main Event, eventually finishing sixth for $155,550.

Then, in 2025, his tournament career moved to another level.

In January, Yokosawa won the $5,100 PokerGO Tour Kickoff event. The 112-entry field included the likes of Erik Seidel, Jesse Lonis and Kristen Foxen among the players who made the money. Yokosawa collected $142,800 for the victory and secured his first PGT title.

A few months later came the biggest result of his career.

The 2025 WSOP $25,000 No-Limit Hold’em High Roller attracted 392 entries, and Yokosawa made it all the way to fifth place. He battled at a final table featuring players including Joe McKeehen, Byron Kaverman and Orpen Kisacikoglu, eventually earning $447,613 – the largest single tournament cash of his career.

It was no isolated breakthrough.

Yokosawa recorded $2,280,409 in live tournament cashes during 2025, more than he had earned in all of his previous years combined. Other highlights included a runner-up finish in a $15,100 ARIA High Roller for $270,000, third place in a Poker Masters event for $104,000 and several deep runs at the U.S. Poker Open.

According to The Hendon Mob, his career live tournament earnings have now surpassed $4.29 million, placing him fourth on Japan’s all-time money list.

Yokosawa’s importance to poker in Japan now extends far beyond his own tournament results.

Perhaps the most striking example came at this year’s WSOP.

As part of a project organised by Yokosawa in partnership with ZIPAIR, nearly 300 Japanese poker players travelled together on a charter flight from Narita to Las Vegas. Yokosawa even organised poker-related entertainment during the flight, while a special WSOP x World Wide Tour freeroll awaited the group in Las Vegas.

The project came at a time when Japanese poker is enjoying remarkable growth.

The 2026 WSOP became the most successful series ever for Japanese players. Naoya Kihara won two bracelets, while Koji Fujimoto and Daisuke Ogita each captured one.

Yokosawa estimates that around 4.5 million people now play poker in Japan, with increasing numbers of Japanese players expected to travel to the WSOP each year.

Kihara, Japan’s first WSOP bracelet winner, has himself highlighted Yokosawa as one of the major forces behind that growth. Speaking to PokerNews, Kihara explained that while his own focus has largely been on promoting mixed games, Yokosawa has introduced huge numbers of new players to No-Limit Hold’em.

Asked by Poker.org about the driving force behind Japan’s current poker boom, Kihara gave an even more concise answer: “It’s Masato.”

Meanwhile, Yokosawa produced another deep WSOP Main Event run in 2026, finishing 124th for $65,000. Earlier in the year, he also placed third in a €10,200 event at EPT Paris and tenth in the Aussie Millions 25K Challenge.

The Hendon Mob’s traffic rankings illustrate Yokosawa’s unusual position within modern poker.

On the database’s all-time popularity ranking, which dates back to 2008, Yokosawa has already climbed to seventh place with more than 725,000 unique profile views.

The only players ahead of him are some of poker’s biggest global icons: Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey, Bryn Kenney, Fedor Holz, Justin Bonomo and Phil Hellmuth.

Right now, however, Yokosawa is attracting more attention than any of them.

He had the most viewed Hendon Mob profile in January, March and April 2026, while across the whole of 2025 he finished almost 76,000 views ahead of second-placed Bryn Kenney.

That makes Yokosawa a relatively rare combination in modern poker.

He has a million-subscriber media platform capable of reaching far beyond the traditional poker audience, while simultaneously building a tournament résumé strong enough to ensure that he cannot be dismissed as merely a celebrity when he sits down in a high-stakes event.

Thirteen years have passed since Yokosawa won WPT Korea at the age of 21. Since then, he has become a YouTube star, entrepreneur and one of the most important ambassadors for Japanese poker – while producing the strongest tournament results of his career over the past two years.

And increasingly, the rest of the poker world appears to be paying attention.