Playing Their Own Game: Vanessa Selbst, Victoria Coren Mitchell and Liv Boeree
Poker has always liked to imagine itself as a pure meritocracy, a game where the cards don’t care who’s holding them. The math is honest enough. The room has rarely been. Something like nine in ten professionals are men, and for a long time the game carried a quiet assumption that this was simply how things were.
The three women here never got that memo, or ignored it. What they share isn’t a playing style, because they don’t have one in common. It’s a point of origin. None of them came up through poker. They arrived from law, from letters, and from astrophysics, beat a game that wasn’t built with them in mind, and then carried those same minds somewhere else entirely.
Vanessa Selbst, the Lawyer Who Bluffed
Vanessa Selbst was supposed to be a lawyer. She was born in Brooklyn in 1984, spent a year at MIT, transferred to Yale for a political science degree, then went back to Yale for a law degree. The plan was a courtroom. The problem was that she kept discovering how good she was at poker.
She played the way you might expect from someone with that kind of mind and none of the usual gambler’s caution: relentlessly aggressive, willing to put an opponent to a decision for all their chips on nothing but a read. The bluffing was famous, and it cost her big stacks on more than one televised occasion. It also made her the most feared woman the game has produced, and one of the most feared players, full stop.
The record backs it up. Three World Series of Poker bracelets, in the 2008 $1,500 Pot Limit Omaha, the 2012 $10,000 10-Game Mix, and the 2014 $25,000 No-Limit Hold’em Mixed Max. Other women have won three bracelets; Selbst is the only player to win all three in open events, beating the whole field rather than a women’s bracket. Add nearly $12 million in tournament earnings, back-to-back North American Poker Tour Main Events in 2010 and 2011, and a $1.8 million score at the 2010 Partouche Poker Tour, and she spent years as the only woman inside the Hendon Mob’s all-time money Top 100.
Then, at the end of 2017, she quit. Not because she was losing. Selbst walked away from Team PokerStars and the professional game on something closer to principle: the grind had stopped feeling like a game, the fields had gotten brutally tough, and she’d grown uncomfortable serving as an ambassador for an industry that sold everyday players the fantasy of easy money. She left to start a family with her wife. It was the rare poker retirement that read as a considered decision rather than a bad run.
Victoria Coren Mitchell, the Writer at the Table
Victoria Coren Mitchell came to poker already fluent in the thing it most rewards: reading people. She was born in London in 1972 into a literary family, the daughter of the humorist Alan Coren and the sister of the journalist Giles Coren. She published a short story at fourteen, read English at Oxford, and built a career in words long before she built one in chips. Her poker memoir, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker, is one of the better books written about the game by someone who actually played it.
Then she made history at the table. In 2006 she became the first woman to win a European Poker Tour title, taking the EPT London Main Event. Eight years later, at San Remo in 2014, she became the first player of any gender to win two EPT Main Events. In a tour that runs through the toughest fields in Europe, nobody else had done it twice.
She was also a natural in the booth, calling major broadcasts like Late Night Poker and the World Poker Tour, which puts her in the same tradition as the commentators in The Voices of Poker. Since 2008 she has hosted the BBC quiz Only Connect, where her dry, precise delivery made her a household name well beyond the felt. She was inducted into the Women in Poker Hall of Fame in 2016, and, like Selbst, ended her PokerStars endorsement in 2014 over concerns about online gambling’s effect on vulnerable players. The poker was never the whole of her, which is exactly what makes it interesting.
Liv Boeree, the Scientist Who Left
Liv Boeree found poker by accident and left it on purpose, and both halves of that sentence matter. She grew up in Kent, took a First Class degree in Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, and played lead guitar in metal bands on the side. Then she applied to a television show called Ultimatepoker.com Showdown, mostly on a whim, and got matched with mentors including Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke, and Dave Ulliott. The math, the reads, the layered strategy: it mapped straight onto a mind already built for it.
The results arrived quickly. In 2010 she won the EPT San Remo Main Event, outlasting a field of more than 1,240 players for €1,250,000, and remains the only woman to hold both a WSOP bracelet and an EPT title, adding a 2017 WSOP Tag Team Championship alongside Igor Kurganov. But the poker may end up as the least consequential thing she’s done. In 2014 she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, a nonprofit that has moved serious money from the poker world toward evidence-based charities. When she largely stepped away from the professional circuit in 2019, it wasn’t to disappear. It was to spend the reasoning she’d sharpened at the table on bigger problems, in front of audiences who had never watched a hand of poker in their lives.
Their Own Game
Three exits, all different. Selbst retired at her peak on a matter of conscience. Coren Mitchell folded poker into a life already full of writing and broadcasting. Boeree turned a decade of decision-making into a second career aimed at the wider world. What they never did was let the game define them, or confine them.
They weren’t the first women to prove it could be done. Annette Obrestad had already won a major online title before she was old enough to legally enter a Las Vegas casino, and a generation of players has followed. But Selbst, Coren Mitchell, and Boeree did something quietly radical in a room that hadn’t expected them: they walked in from the outside, won on the toughest stages the game offers, and then left on terms nobody set for them but themselves. They were always playing their own game.
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About the Author: Shawn Altbaum has been writing and editing in the online gaming industry since 2007, reporting live from the WSOP Main Event and conducting interviews with professional players. An active poker player, he combines industry expertise with firsthand knowledge of the games he covers. He currently serves as Global Head of Copywriting at NSUS Group, overseeing brand voice and content strategy across GGPoker.
