With a top 4 spot on the women’s all-time money list, Liv Boeree is one of the most successful female poker players in the game’s history. Announcing herself on the world stage with a $1M+ win at EPT San Remo in 2010, and subsequently as an ambassador for PokerStars, she was for years one of the most visible women in poker.
Then, by her own admission, she fell out of love with the game and turned her attention to other projects - most notably her Win-Win podcast. But a rare return to high-stakes tournament play in December 2024 resulted in a career-high tournament cash - the biggest live win ever by a female poker player - as she took down $2.8M for her 4th place finish at the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event.
Boeree is the latest big name to join Craig Tapscott for an in-depth chat in our regular video series, The Interview. In it, she shares some fascinating observations about different approaches to the game, including how she perceives different skills and mindsets to be rooted in masculine and feminine energies.
The full episode drops later this week, but here’s a sneak peek.
Boeree, center, was the sole female player to make it to the WSOP Paradise Super Main final table.‘I had to let that identity of being a ‘good pro’ die’
Boeree is aware of how men and women have historically been treated differently in the game, and is the first to admit she may be one of the few women to have actually benefited from this state of affairs.
“If I look back at the early days, like 2008-09, women were seen purely as like a sex symbol marketing thing, and obviously I leaned into that a ton, because I would never have gotten my PokerStars deal had I not been a young girl, you know, and all the attention I got.
“So I'm well aware of how much that has helped me. But it was par for the course to objectify women, it was just completely standard, there'd be rankings of who's the hottest female, we’d be ranked by our looks as opposed to our winnings or any cool plays we made or any smart stuff we said.”
Boeree’s waning affection for poker didn’t stem from this prejudiced attitude, however. In fact, one of the major contributing factors to her decision to shift focus from poker was the rise of solvers and strict GTO strategy - something she initially welcomed whole-heartedly.
“Some people feel [the use of solvers] added more creativity,” she says, “and I can understand that argument too, but for me personally I loved it when the game was both math and street smarts, and it felt like now there's a right answer and if you don't memorize those right answers and you don't follow it properly then you're not doing the game right. There was almost this judgment, and I felt it myself: I was judging.”
Her love of science and math - her academic background is in physics - meant Boeree instinctively leant towards GTO solvers as the future of the game. But she now feels that in doing so, she was ignoring what she loved most about poker, as well as what she believes is her biggest strength at the table.
“I think my strength back in the day was actually that ability to just get lost in the vibe, and the social dynamics that is going on in a game. That's what I used to love and be good at, that was my edge, and then I kind of shut that part of my brain off or something, because it was, like, ‘No, it's all about the math, just work with the solvers’. I think that's partially where I lost my love for the game.”
Liv 'the good pro' at the WPT Five Diamond Poker Classic, 2014.Solvers are still here - and getting more powerful and prevalent than ever - so what was it that changed in Boeree’s mindset that enabled her to come back to poker, to enjoy it again, and to experience such a successful run at WSOP Paradise last December?
“What [taking a break from poker] enabled me to do was to let my ego get over itself a little bit, because I became so wrapped up in this notion of being, like, ‘Liv the good pro’, a science nerd and good at solvers and all this stuff, when actually I'm not that good at that stuff at all, that was never my strength. I had to let that identity of being a ‘good pro’ die. I'm a fish now, I'm an amateur and I'm gonna do fishy stuff and I'm gonna try stuff out, and that's what I really needed.”
The yin and yang of poker
In Boeree’s mind, however, there is more to it than a choice between GTO and exploitative play, or protecting one’s ego and having fun. She explains:
“If we think about the evolution of the game through a very zoomed-out view of masculine and feminine energies, the ‘intuitive’ style of playing is a very feminine energy: caring about the social dynamics at the table, the reads, all that meta information.
“And then the solvers and the math, the very scientific side of the game is much more masculine, and perhaps that's why, looking back on it, I was having to shut down my feminine energy and that's probably why I wasn't having so much fun.”
Representing PokerStars at the LA Poker Classic, 2016.Perhaps it was her position as a ‘sex symbol’ in the game that made her instinctively veer away from the more traditional feminine energies and place her faith in solvers and math, or maybe it was her academic training, but as time has gone on she has grown more comfortable with playing her own game and trusting her instincts.
“I was always a little skeptical of the feminine side of it,” she says, “because that was my own sort of pathology, almost like my own internalized misogyny of ‘the masculine way, the right way’. I was meant to say to women ‘Yes, you're going to be really good at this because you've got all these reads and women's intuition’. I didn't fully believe it, and now I do. Since I've been leaning into the ‘witchy intuitive stuff’ my life is so much more fun.
“So now I can fully say, believing it to my core, that actually yes, women lean into that stuff - and men, whoever - but lean into the energy, the vibe stuff. It's real, it's potent, and that's where the real magic lies.”
The full, exclusive episode of The Interview with Liv Boeree, will be available later this week at PokerOrg, on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out previous episodes of The Interview through the links below.
Additional images courtesy of Joe Giron Photography/Pokerphotoarchive/WSOP/WPT
