Today, we’re looking at some of the best and most well-known female celebrity poker players. Poker might be seen by many as a game for the boys, but there are some great female players out there making their mark on the game. There’s even a Women in Poker Hall of Fame, although there are also, of course, women players who have been nominated to the main World Series Poker Hall of Fame as well. Read on to find out more about the most famous (and infamous) female celebrity poker players.
Vanessa Selbst
Born in Brooklyn in 1984, Vanessa Selbst is one of the best-known female celebrity poker players of all time, and for many, her name still comes to mind when thinking of women poker players, even though she is no longer active in the world poker scene, having pretty much retired by 2019. This New York-born poker professional has won a total of more than $11.9 million throughout her career, making her the highest-earning female poker player of all time, and putting her in the top 100 of the overall All-Time Money List.
Selbst is also one of only three female poker players to have won three World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets. While both Barbara Enright and Nani Dollison can claim the same achievement, Selbst is the only female player to have earned hers exclusively in open events, in 2008, 2012 and 2014. In the WSOP series, open events are those in which all players can participate and that therefore count towards the standings for Player of the Year. In other words, it does not include seniors and ladies events or the specialized casino employee events.
Selbst was a PokerStars Team Pro and won the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure High Roller in January 2013. She was the first woman to ever play in a Super High Roller event and has made it as far as the final table in no less than four High Roller events. Her biggest recorded win was $1,823,430, in the $8,500 buy-in Partouche Poker Tour Main Event in 2010. She has been described as a highly intelligent and incredibly volatile poker player, known for ambitious bluffs that others might not attempt, especially in a tournament setting. Her very aggressive style of play has seen her lose big in some events but has also been behind some of her biggest wins.
On her retirement from the game of poker in 2019, she announced that she would be focusing more on her family. Selbst married her girlfriend Miranda Foster in 2013 and has since had two children with her. However, the former lawyer and Yale University graduate didn’t really slow down that much with her retirement from poker. She subsequently took on a position at a Wall Street hedge fund and is also involved in various causes, including LGBT rights and battling police misconduct. You can find her on Instagram at @vsebstpoker.
Kristen Foxen (Bicknell)
Kristen Foxen was born Kristen Bicknell in 1986 and became Kristen Foxen when she married fellow professional poker player Alex Foxen. The Canadian-born player started to play online poker in 2006 during her freshman year in college and is currently the three-time defending Global Poker Index Female Player of the Year recipient and a former PartyPoker ambassador.
Foxen has total wins of around $5.5 million in live tournaments, and her achievements include three WSOP bracelets. During the 2020 WSOP Online Bracelet Series, she won the $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em 6-Handed event for a total of $356,412. Recently, she has focused more on high-stakes poker tournaments, and in 2018, she became the first-ever female APPT High Roller champion with a win of $279,549 in Macau. She reached the final table of the WPT 500 High Roller in 2021 and the WPT Choctaw Main Event final table in 2022. In the Choctaw Main Event, she finished fifth for a win of $135,000.
Her top win to date was the 2019 Poker Masters tournament, where she won $408,000. Other notable wins include the PokerStars Players Championship in 2019, where her top 12 finish earned her $328,500. She also won the $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em Bounty 2016 World Series of Poker with a win of $290,768. Foxen is still playing poker and apparently has no plans to retire just yet. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Jennifer Harman
Harman was born in Reno, Nevada in 1964. While she can sometimes be found playing live tournaments and has raked in more than $2.7 million in tournament winnings, it is fair to say that live tournament poker has never really been her thing. It seems she prefers cash game poker, having long been a regular in “Bobby’s Room” at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where she is the only regular female player in the casino’s Big Game. Having played in some of the highest-stakes games in Las Vegas for many years, she is highly respected in the city, and champion poker player Daniel Negreanu has long referred to Harman as the greatest female poker player of all time.
Some of Harman’s biggest event wins include the ESPN WSOP Circuit Championship in 2005 in Rio, Las Vegas, where she won $383,840, and the WPT Shooting Star Championship Event 2 in 2008, where she won $330,000. A very significant $1,502,859 of her total winnings have come from cashes at the WSOP. Harman has won two World Series of Poker bracelets in open events, at the No Limit Deuce to Seven Lowball Event in 2000 and the $5K Limit Texas Hold’em event in 2022. Known for her nerves of steel and a strong ability to bluff, she was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2015. You can find her on Instagram at @realjenniferharman.
Annie Duke
Duke is certainly not one of the more popular players in the global poker community, and some would argue she is more infamous than famous, having been plagued with scandal after an incident at the Epic Poker League in 2012. She reportedly took a six-figure payout while the league itself went bankrupt, and she lost many of her fans in the world of poker as a result of the scandal.
Before being touched by scandal, however, Duke managed wins that amounted to more than $4.2 million in live tournament cashes, which happened to be the most live cashes ever by a woman at the time. She won a WSOP bracelet in 2004 at the $2,000 Omaha Hi-Lo 8-or-Better, with a win of $136,860. Her biggest win ever was for $2 million at the 2004 WSOP Tournament of Champions.
Duke was known as one half of a sibling pair of professional poker players with her brother, Howard Lederer, who unfortunately was also involved in a poker scandal, this time the Full Tilt Poker scandal of 2011. Neither Duke nor her brother play poker anymore, and Duke now works as an author, speaker and decision-making strategist, having tied her previous career as a poker player to her current one as a business strategist with a book called Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.
Duke is now co-founder of the non-profit The Alliance for Decision Education, a member of the National Board of After-School All-Stars and the Board of Directors of the Franklin Institute, and also serves on the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative. You can find her on Instagram at @AnnieDuke.
Barbara Enright
Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Barbara Enright was one of the first-ever female celebrity poker players. She is perhaps best known for reaching the World Series of Poker Main Event final table in 1995, where she finished in 5th place for a win of $114,180. Enright was the first woman to make the final table in the WSOP Main Event, which was poker’s most prestigious annual event at the time, and no other woman has since made it to the same position.
Enright had previously won WSOP Ladies Event bracelets at the $500 Ladies Limit Seven Card Stud for $16,400 in 1986, and at the same event for $38,400 in 1994. The largest cash of her career was the $2,500 Pot-Limit Hold’em event in 1996 for $180,000. Her live tournament earnings amount to more than $1.75 million in total.
In 1996, she was the first woman to win an open WSOP event, beating out 180 other players in the $2,500 Pot-Limit Omaha for $180,000. She was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2007 and remains one of the game’s top ambassadors. She is the only poker player to be in all three poker halls of fame: the World Series of Poker Hall of Fame, the Women in Poker Hall of Fame and the Senior Poker Hall of Fame. Enright is now editor-in-chief of Woman Poker Player magazine and an ambassador of the world’s largest women’s poker organization, Poker League of Nations.
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