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Career Alternatives: Poker is a Better Bet than Yale Law School

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 11:06 AM - By Elie Mystal

Vanessa Selbst Yale poker player.jpgLawyers and poker go together like rare steak and red wine. You need many of the same logical skills, interspersed with an ability to take managed risks. With the legal job market looking like a busted straight that you shouldn’t have chased in the first place, maybe it’s time for a different game?

Vanessa Selbst, a 1L at Yale Law School, certainly isn’t relying on a recovery in the legal market for future earnings. The World Series of Poker player was profiled in the Hartford Courant, yesterday:

Although she doesn’t carry a deck of cards with her at all times, Selbst is almost always thinking about gaming, whether she’s home, on the road or in a classroom at Yale law school, where she started last fall. It’s a mental discipline that has taken her from the cafeteria of her New Jersey high school, where she played pick-up games, to the high-roller suites at Foxwood Resort Casino and beyond, helping her become the first woman to win a bracelet in an open event at last June’s 39th annual World Series of Poker (WSOP) and earn nearly $800,000 in tournament winnings in the four years she’s played professionally.

Well, that will pay for law school.

The stereotypical lawyer/poker player is a tight player who takes minimal risks. They tread water and don’t chase and take you down when you make your set on the river while they’ve been slow playing their boat all along.

But Vanessa doesn’t play that way at all.

After the jump, never bluff and bluffer.

According to Ms. Selbst, she plays a lot tighter than she used to:

In her early days, she played as many hands as she could, but now Selbst takes a tight, aggressive approach, knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em, walking away a winner in more games than not.

“When you have terrible cards, you have no choice but to try to pull off a few bluffs,” Selbst says. “But these days, I’m really content to tighten up and wait for my game to come around. The cards almost always improve.”

But her reputation isn’t conservative:

“Vanessa was a very aggressive player — much more a bluffer than a straight shooter,” says Nate Meyvis, a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University and a pro player. “She’s very smart and creative, and she used whatever fundamentally unhealthy elements there were in her poker psychology as fuel to figure out all sorts of clever ways to win pots and get the best of her opponents.”

Obviously, you aren’t getting to the WSOP playing as loosely as you do in a Thursday night friendly game. And you’re not getting there when you’re only playing made hands. But you don’t often see lawyers with reputations as bluffers or finding “clever” ways to win pots. Lawyers play like Colin Powell, not Robert E. Lee.

But the bottom line is that there is money to be made on the professional poker circuit:

In the summer of 2007, Selbst again reached the WSOP finals and took home $140,000.

Before returning to New Haven for law school, on June 12, Selbst won the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event at the WSOP, taking home her first bracelet and $227,933 in winnings

“People still say to me, ‘Oh, you play poker. Do you make a living at that?’” Selbst says.

Oh, you go to Yale Law School. Can you make a living at that?

Yale Law Student Makes Strong Case For Being Among Poker’s Elite [Hartford Courant]


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