Victoria Livschitz Turns Yet Another Passion Into Gold

Victoria Livschitz jumped headfirst into the shark-infested waters of the high roller scene in late 2021, having spent her pandemic lockdown studying all she could about the game. While others may have been intimidated by the talent at the very top of the pyramid, in an environment with very few women, Livschitz had already seen it all before, having succeeded with a number of different business ventures in male-dominated industries.

The Ukraine-born and Lithuania-raised former chess champion emigrated to the United States following the fall of the Iron Curtain, landing in Cleveland. She worked odd jobs to finish school, including opening a chess academy, before landing in the automotive industry, doing research for Ford and General Motors.

She then served as the principal architect for SunGrid, working on the world’s first public cloud-based system, and later founded Grid Dynamics, a technology provider for many major Fortune 500 companies. After her company went public, Livschitz “retired,” starting a food company to support her passion for worldwide hiking, RightOnTrek.

But after finding quick success in the poker high roller world, Livschitz is rapidly climbing the women’s all-time money list rankings, having already cashed for $1.8 million.

Livschitz has four wins already, including an event at the 2023 EPT Paris festival and this year’s Texas Poker Open, and earlier this year managed to cash in four consecutive tournaments at the PokerGO Tour U.S. Poker Open.

Not content to just play the game at the highest levels, this jack-of-all-trades has also partnered with high-stakes pros such as Andrew ‘LuckyChewy’ Lichtenberger and Nick Schulman to create the training tool OctopiPoker, and also donates her time to Pocket Queens, an organization dedicated to the advancement of women in poker.

Livschitz was recently featured on the Poker Stories podcast, where she spoke about her life before poker and explained how she has been able to climb the rankings in such a short amount of time. You can listen to the full episode on CardPlayer.com, YouTube, Spotify, or any podcast app.

Highlights from the interview appear below.

JR: You accomplished a rare feat at the PokerGO studio during the U.S. Poker Open.

VL: Yes, I had a series of four cashes in a row, and it turns out that’s really hard to do. I’m thrilled and somewhat amazed that this came to be, but so it goes. You know, variance cuts both ways. Sometimes you are on the good side, and sometimes you are on the bad side.

JR: You are math-minded, so it makes sense for you to downplay the achievement, but cashing four days in a row is also a testament to your endurance.

VL: That’s true. We start at noon, the bubble bursts sometimes around midnight, and we bag up at 2 a.m. It’s a 30-minute drive home, and even then, I can’t go to sleep anyways because I’m so wound up. And I still have to get up early in the mornings, as I still have business meetings to fit somewhere into that crazy schedule before coming back and playing some more. You burn the candle from both sides, and five hours of sleep becomes a luxury. You do that for [a week straight] and it definitely adds up.

JR: What’s it like to bust from one of these high roller events, and then immediately turn around and buy into another?

VL: It’s so strange. Amongst many other surreal things that happen in these high roller events, is that every day is essentially a high roller turbo. And you play and then you feel lucky enough to make the final table, you battle the final table, and you come out and you just immediately jump into the next one. You might take a walk around the block, but the show must go on.

JR: Before poker, there was chess.

VL: I played chess growing up and was the Lithuanian Junior Champion and Women’s Champion. My father was an incredibly-gifted person, a true renaissance man. He was a famous mathematician, and also poet and musician. He even conducted symphony orchestras. And he loved chess. So, I learned to play when I was maybe three or so. My dad took me to a chess school, and it kind of grew from there.

During college, the Soviet Union started to show some cracks and the Iron Curtain started to open up just a little bit. And one of the things we could do is start going to chess tournaments abroad in Eastern Europe. Bulgaria was running a lot of big chess tournaments, in Sofia specifically. And so, my freshman year in college, I went on this trip abroad.

On the first day of the tournament, I met this cute guy from Ukraine. He was an International Master and, on his way to becoming a Grandmaster. And then on the last day of the tournament, he proposed. So I came back kind of engaged.

We got married, and then the Soviet Union really did collapse very quickly after that. We had the opportunity to leave as political refugees and in 1991 came to the United States.

JR: What was life like when you got to the states?

VL: I remember, very vividly, the first impression I got was that everybody smiles in the U.S. It was such a shock to the system. You would see a stranger walking down the street, and they would flash this huge smile at you. Maybe even wave and ask how you are doing. In Russia, that [didn’t happen]. People don’t just open up conversations, they mind their own business. It was just a really different culture.

We had $500 to our name, and I had my newborn daughter. There was economic depression across the country. I was working four jobs, and we were just doing whatever we could to [get by]. I needed something practical to make money, so I changed my degree from mathematics to computer science.

JR: Did you also start a chess school?

VL: My first business! We were in Cleveland, and somebody with the newspaper thought it would be cool to do a feature story on two immigrant chess players from Ukraine. They ended up organizing an exhibition match where I would play 27 other people simultaneously, which I had never done before.

We lined them all up, and I played for six hours. I had to take two breaks to go breastfeed the baby, but I won 21 of the matches and drew three.

But while I was playing, my husband at the time, Leonard, was just taking down the contact info for anyone watching who wanted lessons. By the end of the day, the Livschitz Chess Academy was born.

JR: Were you always tech-minded, or did that come later?

VL: I think I was more survival minded. (laughs)

JR: You had stints doing research for the Ford Motor Company, considered a master’s in electrical engineering briefly before pivoting to Sun Microsystems and moving to Silicon Valley. Then you decided to get your PhD in computer science at Stanford, before getting bored and launching Grid Dynamics, one of the pioneers of cloud-based computing.

VL: The last thing I did for Sun Microsystems was Sun Grid, which was working with a small group of people who really built the very first cloud. I was convinced this was the future, and I thought I had a really good idea of how it would take off. And it did.

So we built clouds for a range of companies from Microsoft, to eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, and Google, among others.

JR: Those are some pretty big companies…

VL: It was a crazy, wild ride. We ended up going public, and that’s when I retired from tech.

JR: But you didn’t really retire did you? After hiking the world, seeing everything from the Sub-Antarctic Patagonia to the Brooks Range [in northern Alaska].

VL: I have a knack for getting myself in trouble, but luckily I also have a knack for getting myself out of it. I was backpacking in Peru, very high elevation. It was incredibly beautiful, but it was about 17,000 ft. I didn’t acclimate properly, so I develop high altitude pulmonary edema, where my lungs started shutting down. It was pretty dangerous, and I was lucky enough to come down just in time.

JR: And that didn’t dissuade you from starting your next company, RightOnTrek, which provides wilderness-friendly meals for all who love the outdoors. But during COVID you were locked indoors, and that’s when you discovered poker.

VL: I don’t watch TV. I also lived with my older mother, so I was under very strict quarantine. I didn’t go anywhere for 18 months, didn’t see anybody. So I sort of stumbled onto poker, particularly tournaments and final tables. I watched some high-stakes cash games as well. Everything I could find.

I was fascinated by the game. I was fascinated by the people. I had played occasionally before, some low stakes after work to relax. But they were playing something entirely different, and using mysterious words to me like “blockers” and “ICM.” I spent 18 months, funnily enough, not playing, just studying.

JR: Then when it was time to play, you jumped into the deep end headfirst.

VL: I came to Vegas and entered some $200 daily tournament, and I won it. So, I looked at the WSOP schedule, and it said there was a $25,000 bracelet event starting.

I wasn’t registering to win it. I had no aspirations like that. It was more like, I’m clearly drawn to the poker world, and I have this hunch that, maybe it’s just my game. Maybe it’s just a late gift in life. Maybe I was meant to discover this.

Obviously, it is an incredibly complex game, and very technical. People don’t typically become very good overnight. But I thought that having my chess and math background would be extremely helpful. And if you think that these tournaments are high-stakes gambles, they don’t compare to the 30 years I had as an entrepreneur in the tech world with bigger gambles and a much more complicated game tree.

I knew I needed a coach. I needed a guide. But I’m nobody. I don’t know anybody. Nobody will talk to me. But if I enter this $25,000 tournament, I’ll get to meet these people, and maybe something magical and interesting will happen. And something magical and interesting did happen.

JR: That’s right. Not only did you find plenty of people willing to talk to you, but you even started yet another company with Andrew ‘Lucky Chewy’ Lichtenberger and Nick Schulman, Octopi Poker.

VL: We were at the Hard Rock for a WPT event, and Chewy had just won the $50,000 event. I was cheering him on to the win and got invited to be a part of the celebration dinner. At that point, a friendship was developing, and we would sometimes talk about poker.

That particular night, the conversation turned toward the study process. Tools, solvers, etc. As a newcomer to poker, I explained to them just how bad these tools were. They were [so hard to use] and unintuitive that I didn’t want to learn them. But to them, these were great tools and it was second-nature to use them.

That was the genesis of me explaining that we could do it better. That there was a better way to learn poker. And together we started peeling the layers of the onion. By 5 a.m., we were like, ‘holy shit, we have all the right skills in the room.’ There were six of us, all wanting to build poker’s greatest tech company. I think Octopi Poker is now my 12th start up.

Chewy and I then made this barter pact. He was going to be my mentor and coach on my poker journey, and I was going to be his mentor and coach in his business journey.

JR: As a sharp business mind, how do you see the poker market now and in the future?

VL: I think it’s incredible. This is what has attracted my attention as an entrepreneur, even though the venture is less about pure money for me, more about the intangibles of it all. I’ve kind of retired from just building companies for companies sake, and this is no different. This just has a lot of reasons why I want to be a part of it, that is not purely financial.

But when I do put on my business owner, investor, entrepreneur hat, I see an incredible market. Gaming is generally exploding everywhere. Poker is part of that tidal wave. It’s growing in every market, in every segment in every possible way. Online poker is in a perilous state, and we all hope that something good will happen on the regulatory side, but live poker is basically becoming a spectator sport. It’s becoming a consumer product. Depending on the location, there’s anywhere from 8 to 10 percent of the adult population playing poker. These are mind boggling numbers. ♠

Follow Victoria Livschitz on Twitter/X @VictoriaL_64 and check out Octopi Poker for the latest poker training tools. Those interested can also join Pocket Queens, a free study group dedicated to furthering women in poker and providing a space to learn, share, and celebrate each other.

*Photos by PokerGO