Vanessa Rousso
Vanessa Rousso is one of the most famous female poker players, gaining notoriety when she appeared in many of the first poker TV shows aired on major channels. She was known as one of the original female poker players when the poker boom hit post-2003. Vanessa is also an avid blackjack player, often spotted at the high limit tables at the Bellagio, hat tightly pulled down over her face.
Vanessa first fell in love with poker when she was only a teenager. Due to her age, she wasn’t able to participate in live poker tourneys or gamble at casinos, so she started playing online poker. She had experienced some success online and all the while she had worked her way into law school. Once she started school, she was old enough to play poker in the casinos and that’s exactly what she did. Vanessa started playing sit and gos with $250 purses at a local casino. She used her winnings to parlay it all the way into her first World Poker Tour event, where she immediately made an image for herself as the girl with headphones, sunglasses and a hat pulled low.
In her illustrious career, Vanessa made a huge name for herself as one of the best female players in poker. This stemmed mostly from her numerous TV appearances both in tournament coverage as well as special poker episodes such as Poker After Dark. In 2006 she was doing poker full time and among the top 80 poker earners in the world. She constantly finishes in top 10’s and top 20’s in many coveted tournaments, making her total tournament winnings pretty outstanding,
Vanessa has finished 2nd place in the WCOOP earning over $700,000 and has finished 2nd in the World Poker Tour’s 5 Diamond Classic, earning her over $350,000. That puts Rousso in the top 5 women earners of all time in the game, and she has undoubtedly been branded as the #1 sex symbol in poker. Despite being an absolute star in the game for nearly a decade now, Vanessa is remarkably only 30 years old. That means that she has some serious staying power, considering comparable sex symbols in the game are in their 40’s and 50’s (Beth Shak and Jennifer Tilly, respectively).