Kathy Liebert
Top Professional Poker Player
Kathy Liebert is considered one of the best female players in professional poker. She was the first woman to win a million dollar prize in a tournament.
Kathy started playing poker when she was a kid in low stakes games with her family. Then she played low-limit poker in Colorado in 1991. She was a prop for awhile and began playing tournament poker in 1994. Born in Tennessee, she grew up in Long Island, New York and now resides in Downey, California and Las Vegas. She earned a B. S. degree in business and finance from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY and she worked as an analyst for Dunn and Bradstreet for a year where she did well but didn't like what she was doing. After quitting that job and traveling for a while, she moved to California where she played poker in Las Vegas. After playing for a while, a friend suggested she play for a living. After entering a couple of tournaments and doing well she then decided to get serious about poker and propped for a small cardroom. She likes to enter some of her tournaments through single-table satellites because they offer a way to reduce costs and to practice her skills and although she has made a lot of money in poker tournaments, she maintains an investments portfolio and takes some of her winnings from poker and invests them in the stock market when a good opportunity comes along to ensure her financial future. She has said that the keys to her success have been her competitiveness and her reading poker literature as well as the many hours she spend learning the fundamentals by playing low-limits when she started out.