Laying Down the Law on the Felt

There’s no denying that Vanessa Selbst is a great poker player. In April, she topped a field of 716 players to earn the inaugural North American Poker Tour Mohegan Sun main-event title and the first-place prize money of $750,000. Throw four other wins and a World Series of Poker bracelet into the mix, and you have the makings of a potential superstar.

The 25-year-old’s results speak for themselves, as her nearly $1.7 million in tournament earnings is very impressive. But despite her on-the-felt success, it’s when Selbst is away from the table that she truly challenges herself.

After a stellar 2008 run at the World Series, Selbst did something that’s unthinkable to most young players: She returned to her alma mater, Yale, to enroll in law school.

While poker has enabled many players to achieve their dreams and create better lives for themselves, Selbst is careful not to let the game define her as a person. She doesn’t treat poker like a job, plays sparingly, has fun, and hopes to parlay her poker profits into practicing civil rights law.

From Brooklyn to Montclair to New Haven
Selbst was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1984. Her mother, Ronnie, was an options trader turned lawyer, and actually supplemented her income with poker while attending MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. After spending most of her childhood as a New Yorker, Selbst moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where she attended high school. It was there that she learned the game of poker, and began to play casually with her friends. The game was modestly profitable for her at the time, but it wasn’t until she got to college that she began to realize just how fun the game could be.

After enrolling at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, she began to take the game more seriously as she pursued her degree in political science. After a series of missteps with some $100 deposits online, she discovered the benefits of bankroll management and began to steadily build a bankroll to the point where she was sustaining herself in the game.

From New Haven to Las Vegas
After graduation and a couple of years of online grinding, Selbst made the trip to Las Vegas with some friends and entered a few WSOP tournaments. Right off the bat, she found success, as she navigated her way through a field of 1,919 players in a $2,000 no-limit hold’em event.

She arrived at the final table with the third-biggest stack, and easily could have waited out most of the other players en route to a monster payday after moving into second place, but her desire to always play for the win led to a disappointing finish. In her elimination hand, which was televised by ESPN, Selbst raised to 66,000 and was called before chip leader Kevin Peterson reraised to 200,000. Unwilling to back down, Selbst moved all in, only to get called instantly by Peterson with pocket aces. Selbst had to show down her 5-2, and was eliminated in seventh place after Peterson made quads.

The TV broadcast did not portray Selbst’s play in a positive light, and many were quick to interject their opinions on the hand in the weeks that followed. Selbst, however, was comforted by the fact that she knew something that most didn’t at the time.

“At the time, three-betting and four-betting light was considered to be pretty unconventional,” she explained. “Obviously, today the move could be easily explained and perhaps justified, but at the time, I was just looked upon as being out of control. I took a lot of s—- for it at the time, just because many players were content to play standard, ABC-style poker, thinking that was the only winning strategy. My friends and colleagues, whom I respect, were torn on whether or not it was a good play, but the important distinction there was that they all understood the reasoning behind it, and didn’t blindly condemn it just because I happened to have run one of the worst hands in poker into the best hand.”

Selbst did earn $101,285 for that finish, and used it as motivation to get back into the winner’s circle. The next year, she made another WSOP final table, this time in the ladies event. A week later, she tore through the inaugural heads-up no-limit hold’em world championship event and finished in third place, earning $128,968. Incredibly, she returned in 2008 and did it again in the same event, this time picking up $108,288 for her third-place finish.

“That’s just one of those events that just seems like it’s made for my style of play,” she said. “Heads-up no-limit hold’em was my best game for quite a while, and that’s one of those tournaments in which I feel I can make a deep run year after year.”

Of course, 2008 was also the year that Selbst picked up her WSOP gold. She decided to enter a $1,500 pot-limit Omaha tournament, and 758 opponents later, she had captured the win for a $227,933 payday. All of a sudden, she was in the running for WSOP Player of the Year, but instead of heading out on the tournament circuit, she went back home and enrolled in Yale Law School.

From Las Vegas to New Haven
Selbst was on fire and riding high on the felt, but that quickly took a back seat to her textbooks and long hours in the library. Some questioned why she would trade the bright lights of Sin City for the nights of studying in New Haven, especially when there was so much money to be made. But Selbst has never played the game for the money.

“Poker was never about the money, and it still isn’t,” she said. “I play poker because I can honestly say that I love the game. When it stops being fun and I go through stretches where I don’t want to play anymore, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. In fact, the reason why I took a break from the game for school was because I was a little burned out on poker, and it stopped being an enjoyable experience for me.”

Selbst went on to explain the downside of devoting your life to the game. “Poker can consume you and take over your life if you let it. Before long, you can shut out everything else in your world and won’t be living the healthiest lifestyle, so it’s important to find the proper balance. It has nothing to do with winning or losing, either, although winning certainly is more fun than losing. When I started looking at poker like a job or a chore, I began to lose the thrill of playing the game. And that’s what it is. Ultimately, it’s a game.”

From New Haven to Uncasville
Other than winning a couple of tournaments on trips to nearby Foxwoods, Selbst hasn’t been able to play poker as often as she’d like. “Because of law school, I’ve really had time for only about 20 live tournaments or so,” she said. “Obviously, I’ve run ridiculously hot to put up the results that I have in that time frame, but I think a lot of it should be attributed to the fact that when I go out there, I’m having a blast. When you start having fun at the tables, great things can happen.”

Great things have happened, especially to Selbst, who decided to play in the nearby NAPT Mohegan Sun main event, despite a cold run in the side games. She put up the $5,000 buy-in and was rewarded by a five-day run that saw her more or less lead the field from wire to wire.

When she arrived at the final table, she had to contend with a tough lineup that included Jonathan Aguiar, Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy, and Scott Seiver. Nonetheless, she used her home-field advantage and a rowdy support group made up of both poker and law school friends to steamroll her opponents for the win.

During the short-lived heads-up match, runner-up Mike Beasley commented, “If I ever get heads up in one of these things again, I’m hiring myself a new cheering section. I’m hiring your cheering section.”

Laying Down the Law
With tuition concerns behind her, Selbst can now focus on supporting others. She is now in her second year of law school, and plans on specializing in civil rights law when she graduates. As for her plans for the future, she doesn’t see a need to choose between her two greatest loves.

“I think I can be successful at both. I’ve obviously accomplished a lot in my short career in poker, but I’d like to prove that I can continue to win long term,” she explained. “The same goes for my law career. I still have a ways to go before I graduate and start proving myself in the courtroom, but there’s no reason that I can’t thrive in both environments. I’d love to be able to practice pro bono half of the time with a firm, and spend the other half of the year competing on the tournament circuit or in the cash games.”

A Playing Style All Her Own

Vanessa Selbst has been described by her opponents as being relentlessly
hyperaggressive, and for the most part, she acknowledges that. But she’s also careful to point out that aggression alone doesn’t get the job done. Because of her image, she is constantly being put to the test, but without a firm grip on her opponents, it would be much more difficult for her to play her game.

“I can usually tell pretty fast at the table how someone views me as a player,” she explained. “I’m pretty good at picking up on whether someone will play back at me or let me have their blinds all day. There are so many times when I will raise preflop, and a guy will be sitting there in the big blind with K-10 or something, and won’t know what to do. Should he reraise me or just take a flop? If he reraises and I four-bet him, should he give me credit? If he calls, what does he do on the flop? I like the fact that my image makes players uncomfortable. They’ll either make a mistake by being too passive, or get frustrated, do something off the wall, and give me all of their chips.”

“I definitely think my image at the table can intimidate others and enable me to get away with more stealing,” said Selbst. “At the same time, it’s a style that forces me to be very confident in my hand-reading abilities, because other players will play back at me so often. I play a lot of hands, and I’m going to be inducing plays with many marginal hands, because, let’s be honest, I’m not going to be making the nuts very often. So, my hand-reading ability is integral to my success, and goes hand in hand with my image at the tables. For example, I might bet a marginal hand on the river, expecting an aggressive player to come back over the top of me, but if I’m not ready to call or even move all in over that raise, it’s kind of a worthless skill.”

Selbst went into further detail, explaining a key hand in the NAPT Mohegan Sun main event when the tournament was down to the final 12 players. “Alan Sternberg had about 1.7 million, or 42 big blinds, and he raised from the cutoff to 95,000. I decided to reraise to 280,000 with A-5 suited. Now, was I trying to induce him to shove on me? Not necessarily. At the same time, I knew that was a possibility. He ended up moving all in, and I had a big decision to think about.

“I went over what I knew about him as a player. I knew that he was a pretty loose player and could be a little crazy, though not necessarily in a bad way. If he had a bigger hand, I think he would have put in a smaller four-bet, trying to get action, but his shove told me that he was trying to shut the hand down right then and there. I mean, he had a lot of options. He could have just called or four-bet small, so when he shoved it all in, it told me that he was weak. I went with my read and he turned over 6-5 suited. My hand held up and I won a huge pot, and that really set me up to take over at the final table.”

While others are looking to avoid confrontations at the poker table, Selbst relishes it. “I love it,” she said. “I absolutely love it. Obviously, if I had less skill, I wouldn’t want so many people playing back at me, but I’m comfortable in my own game and confident that this image I have works for me.”

Selbst by the Numbers

Despite a very limited playing schedule, Vanessa Selbst has managed to make the most of her appearances on the tournament circuit. Sticking mainly to the summer events of the World Series of Poker and a few stops in nearby Connecticut casinos, she already has chalked up nearly $1.7 million in career earnings.

Here’s a look at some of the highlights: