WSOP Europe lands in Prague from March 31–April 12 with 15 bracelets on the line, including the €5,300 Main Event. Before the action begins, we’re counting down the greatest moments in the festival’s history. Want to play the Main Event for free? Enter our draw now.
Stars fade over time. But it’s still hard to believe some younger poker players aren’t aware of Annette Obrestad.
She became the youngest WSOP bracelet winner in history when she won the inaugural WSOP Europe Main Event in 2007, just one day before her 19th birthday.
And before that victory, she had already stunned the online poker world by winning a tournament without looking at her cards.
The rise of ‘Annette_15’
Back in the day, Obrestad burned bright as the poster child of a new generation of online poker players.
Her online name, Annette_15, must rank among the most honest. When she first signed up to play in 2004, Obrestad was actually 15 years old. She began competing for play money, won cash in a couple of freerolls, never made a single deposit, and ran her bankroll up to a high six-figure sum.
Growing up in a small Norwegian town, exposed to poker via an advert at a local bowling alley, she quickly established a feel for the intricacies of tournament poker.
The question of who she really was became increasingly pressing as her winnings mounted.
In 2007, shortly before the inaugural WSOP Europe, Obrestad wanted to prove something to the online poker world: that cards don’t matter as much as people think they do.
She set herself a challenge. She registered for a $4 buy-in 180-player Sit & Go and covered her hole cards with a Post-it note so she couldn’t see them.
She played the whole tournament that way – and won it.
“I really did it in an effort to create discussion among the online players; but it had the effect of impacting my own game as well,” she said at the time.
“The point I wanted to prove was that you can have whatever cards you want people to think you have. It’s all in how you play your hand and the information you convey. It puts a stop to people complaining about being card dead and having bad beats. It was amazing how many times I was able to win with 2-7 – and folded aces or queens preflop.”
The stunt further solidified Obrestad’s rep as an online legend, famous for fearless play and unbridled aggression.
Annette Obrestad started playing poker at 15 – and burst onto the live scene just three years later.
From online phenom to WSOPE winner
At the same time, though, away from the pseudonymous internet poker world, she remained an incognito figure. Before the WSOPE, few online players knew who she was; few in the real world knew that she played.
By day she lived the life of a typical small-town Scandinavian. At night, she emerged as an online assassin. Residing in a place that most people would consider boring, Obrestad had few distractions standing between her and poker. It allowed her to develop the killer game she brought to the first-ever WSOP Europe, not long before her 19th birthday.
Despite her success online, she hit London with limited expectations – her results in other live tournaments around Europe had been fairly lackluster. “I thought, at minimum, it would be a chance for me to see some of the best players, live, in action,” she said.
“I had watched enough poker on TV to know that I needed a good pair of sunglasses and a manicure. I had read about tells and the importance of looking emotionless. Plus I had played so many hands online and seen so many situations that I didn’t expect a lot of what happened with the cards to surprise me. More unusual was being among all these well-known poker players and having a few people ask me if I was ‘Annette_15’. That was a first, and, honestly, it felt a little strange.”
The teenage champ who stunned the poker world
However, once the cards were in the air, she quickly shook off any discomfort and focused on the game. If anything, Obrestad was surprised by how passively many of the best-known pros operated. She saw their levels of aggression hovering below what got her to where she was, and she classified the so-called ‘superstars’ as bad players.
She beat John Tabatabai heads-up, with both players boasting giant stacks that modern-day players can only dream about.
Tabatabai had 
and Obrestad had 
when the flop came down 
. All the money went in, and as the 
turn dropped, her incredible composure cracked for the first time as the enormity of what she’d done sunk in. Her friends vaulted the rail and rushed to embrace her.
Annette Obrestad in fearsome company, with Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, and others. From poker prodigy to Scrabble champion
Soon after becoming the youngest bracelet winner in history, she started railing against established players.
“I wasn’t too impressed with the live pros,” she said after taking down the £1 million first-place prize – in just her fifth live cash ever.
Comments like that one didn’t exactly make her popular inside the more entrenched poker world, but she did get closer to establishing her bona fides a month later. That’s when she finished second at the EPT Dublin for $429,181.
“I was feeling good about my game,” said Obrestad, “and I was still on a mini-rush from London. Things seemed to fall together for me in Dublin.”
By that time, Obrestad was already transforming into a well-known superstar. “Suddenly magazines wanted to interview me, and everything changed,” she said. “Considering my finish in Dublin, people thought that I would crush every tournament. Quickly, of course, reality set in.”
Annette Obrestad joined Full Tilt Poker as an ambassador in 2010.The win at the inaugural WSOPE remains her biggest.
Obrestad became an ambassador for Betfair Poker and Full Tilt Poker and won a £5K heads-up event at EPT London in 2010. But she gradually faded from the scene and recorded her last cash in 2018 – until she emerged in January 2026 to take sixth place in a $150 Monster Stack at Orleans in Vegas.
These days, you’re more likely to find her playing Scrabble competitively. She won her last Scrabble tournament in February 2025, taking home a more modest $1,100.
You can read more about her Scrabble exploits below.
And, in a PokerOrg exclusive, Obrestad speaks for the first time in almost a decade about poker and the road she’s been on since that remarkable run in the game. Is a comeback on the cards? Look out for the full interview on Friday.
