Answer by LMeyer for Akka - assign dispatcher to an actor based on name pattern

The docs explicitly state you cannot :

You can use asterisks as wildcard matches for the actor path sections, so you could specify: /*/sampleActor and that would match all sampleActor on that level in the hierarchy. You can also use wildcard in the last position to match all actors at a certain level:/someParent/*. Non-wildcard matches always have higher priority to match than wildcards, so: /foo/bar is considered more specific than/foo/* and only the highest priority match is used. Please note that it cannot be used to partially match section, like this: /foo*/bar, /f*o/bar etc.

I'm afraid your /OptimizationManager-* is considered a partial match.