Poker news | Sep 15, 2022
Poker Pros with Side Hustles
By RTR Jamie
Poker is often used as a side hustle but when you get to a professional level, it might become your main source of income and eventually lead to having another profession on the side of playing poker.
Victoria Coren Mitchell
Victoria Coren Mitchell is an English professional poker player and is the first and only two-time winner of the European Poker Tour. She has over $2 million in tournament winnings and is possibly the only person who has had to beat Phil Ivey to win one tournament and Roger de Courcey to win another.
Not only is Victoria a professional poker player, but she is also a writer, broadcaster, and presenter. So she has more than one subsidiary, pretty impressive!
She has written two books, ‘For Richer, For Poorer’, which poker book of her experience in the poker underworld, and ‘Once More, With Feeling’, which is a true and funny story about the sex trade that she wrote with Charlie Skelton.
Victoria also presents the game show ‘Only Connect’, where she challenges teams to make connections between apparently unconnected things.
Annette Obrestad
Annette Obrestad is a Norwegian professional poker pro and is the youngest person to ever win a World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet, which she won just 1 day before her 19th birthday.
Annette started playing poker at the age of 15, at the time she just played freerolls without ever making a deposit. She eventually managed to start playing real money events with the $9 she won from a freeroll, jet-starting her poker career.
Annette has around $3.9 million in tournament winnings, however, over time it seems that her poker interest had subsided as she became increasingly popular on her youtube channel. Her last recorded live cash winning was in 2018.
She has a youtube channel dedicated to make-up with 46.4k subscribers, where she will post videos from make-up tutorials to reviews. If you’re interested to find out more, you can find her channel here.
Dan Bilzerian
Now, this is one you might know as there seems to be frequent uproar with the player and his business, in fact fairly recently there was some news about his business being in ‘Hot Water.
According to cardplayer.com, Dan Bilzerian has a single cash game win, with a total of $36,626 in winnings. However, in November 2013, he posted an unconfirmed claim that he had won around $10.8 million in just one night from playing poker; there are currently no sources that state this is true.
As a side hustle, or perhaps now as his main hustle, since he is no longer working with Poker site GGPoker, Dan owns a company that sells e-cigarettes, CBD oil, vodka, and water bottles called Ignite.
According to Pokernews, Dan’s company was investigated by the Ontario Securities Commission, the US Department of Justice, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for illegal fraud.
In July, it was announced Ignite would go from a publicly-traded company to a private entity, raising suspicion.
The SEC said it “is continuing its fact-finding investigation and, to date, has not concluded that any individual or entity has violated the federal securities laws.”
Liv Boeree
Olivia Boree is a former professional poker player, she is a WSOP and EPT champion, making her the only female to do so. Her tournament winnings are over $3.8 million as of January 2020.
Liv also works as a TV presenter, and British Science communicator, it is difficult to guess which of the three was/is her side income. Liv has a background in astrophysics, she uses this experience to educate audiences about her passion for science, game theory, and experiments.
She currently has a youtube channel where she discusses her favourite topics. She was also a presenter for the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and the BBC during her poker playing days.
It seems that she has given up her poker profession to pursue science full-time.
Patrik Antonius
Patrik Antonis is a Finnish high stakes poker player, with a total of $137,908,45 in live earnings, he is ranked 60th on the all-time money list - not too shabby.
His most recent win was at the Triton Poker Super High Roller Series in Cyprus this year. He also competed in the European Poker Tour and finished in 9th and 11th place.
Patrik is also a former tennis player but unfortunately, a bulging disc in his back forced him into retirement. He then took up tennis coaching and playing poker, he was eventually spotted for his impressively good poker strategies by poker pro Marcel Luske, and then was advised by Jennifer Harman.
He is also a model but it is difficult to find any more information about that as it is his side hustle in Finland.
