Vanessa Rousso: Professional Poker Player

Vanessa Ashley Rousso, born February
5, 1983, is a law student at the University of Miami
and a professional poker player. Born in White Plains,
New York, Rousso has dual citizenships with the United
States and France. She has earned money as a professional
poker player since 2005, is a member of Team PokerStars,
and a represents GoDaddy.com in television ads. Vanessa
was her high school class valedictorian and graduated
from Duke University in December 2003.
Actually,
she
graduated early from Duke University after two and
a half years with a major in economics, and began
law school in 2004. During Law School at the University
of Miami School of Law, she served on the editorial
board of the University of Miami Law Review. A poker
player since the age of five, Vanessa
began serious poker tournament play during her summer
break from law school, where she was in the top 5%
of her law school class.
As of 2009, Rousso had finished
in the money in several professional live poker events and
had earned over $2,100,000 in career earnings. She
had placed in the money a cumulative total of seven
times in the 2005, 2006 and 2008 World Series of
Poker. In 2007, she had earned over $700,000
with a second place finish in the main event of the
World Championship of Online Poker, however,
in the 2008 tournament, she only placed 625th out
of 6844 entrants in the Main event. At the age of
26, she ranks among the top five women in poker history
in terms of all-time money winnings. In addition
to being one of the game's foremost sex symbols,
she has been a pro-gambling activist on both the
national and state level.
In 2009, Rousso spoke in favor
of changes to Florida gambling laws that would
remove caps on buy-ins and wagers on poker in the
state. She thought the
gambling limitations precluded strategic skilled
deeper stack competition and said that Florida gamblers "don't
have enough chips in front of them to play out the
bets and raises that are required in the skillful
aspect of the game". In 2007, a $100 cap replaced
a $2/bet limit. This cap still prohibits large tournaments
with multi-thousand dollar buy-ins from occurring
in Florida.
Rousso had her own poker instructional
camp during April, 2009, in South Florida.
The camp related poker playing and strategies to
the strategies of military conflict in Sun Tzu's
book, The
Art of War.
She called her camp "Big Slick Boot Camp" and charged
a $399 fee to participate. The camp's website makes an
analogy between of the Art of War, and the Art of
Poker.