Famous female poker players who changed the game
Five women account for almost every barrier that fell in tournament poker between 1995 and 2026. One reached a Main Event final table that no woman has reached since. One took the first $1 million first prize won by a woman. One won open bracelets when the received wisdom said the ladies event was the ceiling. The other two rewrote the money list and the bracelet count, and one of them left at 34 for a career in finance.
Barbara Enright and the 1995 Main Event
Barbara Enright finished 5th in the 1995 World Series of Poker Main Event for $114,180. She remains the only woman to reach that final table. The field that year was 273 players, and Dan Harrington won it. Thirty-one years of Main Events have followed, with fields growing from a few hundred entrants to several thousand, and the record has held.
The size of the 1995 field is part of why the result is still cited. A 273-player Main Event was small enough that a deep run could be dismissed as variance, and large enough that reaching 5th meant surviving the strongest group of professionals then playing. Enright was 5 places from a title in a room where nobody had prepared for a woman to be there at the end.
Enright won three bracelets across her career, and she was the first woman to take an open event at the World Series rather than a ladies title. She was also the first woman to win two bracelets, then the first to win three, and the first inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. Each of those firsts was a piece of evidence against the assumption that women in the field were there to make up numbers.
Kathy Liebert’s Million Dollar First
Kathy Liebert took a business and finance degree from Marist College and a job at Dun and Bradstreet before deciding corporate work was not for her. Successful stock investments funded an exit. Her card career began in Colorado in 1992, when a card room hired her as a prop player, paid to sit down and play poker so that games could start on a slow afternoon.
Her tournament career took shape in the late 1990s at World Series and World Poker Tour events, and in 2002 she won a $1 million first prize, the first won by a woman in any tournament. Her live tournament winnings now exceed $7 million and she has one bracelet. The prop player job shows how a professional career started in that era. A card room needed bodies in seats, hired her to fill them, and the education came from the hours she put in across the table from regulars who had been playing far longer.
Jennifer Harman’s Two Open Bracelets
Jennifer Harman won her first bracelet in 2000 in no-limit deuce to seven lowball, an event most of the field had never played seriously. Two years later she won a $5,000 no-limit Hold’em event. No woman had taken two open bracelets before. She was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2015 and spent most of her career in the highest cash games in Las Vegas rather than on the tournament circuit. For years she was the only woman playing regularly in the Big Game at the Bellagio, the highest-stakes cash game in the city, which is a harder seat to hold than any single tournament result.
She did it with a medical history that would have ended most careers. Harman took a year away from the game in 2004 for her second kidney transplant. She then founded a non-profit for organ donation awareness, and in March 2009 she organized a two-day charity event that raised $111,000 for the National Kidney Foundation. As of November 2024, more than 103,000 people in the United States were waiting for organ transplants, which gives some scale to what she was raising money against.
Vanessa Selbst’s Three Open Titles
Vanessa Selbst won three bracelets, all in open events, and no other woman has done that. Her live tournament earnings passed $11.9 million, which made her the highest-earning woman in the game for most of the last decade. She took a law degree at Yale in 2012 and kept playing at the highest buy-in levels while she did it. She is also the only woman to have held the world number one position in the Global Poker Index rankings, which measure results across the tournament circuit rather than a single event.
In 2018, at 34, she stopped playing professionally and took a job at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund. A player who prices uncertainty under pressure for 12 hours at a stretch is doing work a quantitative fund pays for, and a firm managing over $102 billion hired her on that basis rather than on a poker reputation.
Kristen Foxen and the Current Record Book
Kristen Foxen has won 6 World Series bracelets, more than any other woman in the event’s history. At the 2026 World Series she won the $25,000 high roller no-limit Hold’em for $1,773,083, the largest score of her career. She has been named Global Poker Index female player of the year 5 times.
The bracelets came from different formats across 13 years. She took the 2013 ladies event for $173,922, a $1,500 bounty event in 2016 for $290,768, a $2,500 six-handed event in 2020 for $356,412, an $888 event in 2023 that made her the first woman with 4 bracelets, and a $1,000 six-max event in 2024. The 2026 high roller was the sixth and the first to pay seven figures.
The Hendon Mob database credits her with close to $19 million across 295 recorded cashes, which puts her at the top of the women’s all-time money list ahead of Selbst, Liebert and Liv Boeree. Card Player’s database lists a higher figure because it counts confirmed online results as well. The gap between the two numbers is a reminder that the record book is still being assembled while she is adding to it.
The Next Field
None of the five had a pipeline behind her. There is one now. The female billionaire who co-founded the trading firm PEAK6 runs a program that has introduced the game to about 32,000 women and girls across 40 countries since 2020. Enright reached her final table out of a field where a woman at the end was a novelty, and Liebert learned the game because a card room needed a body in a seat. The 32,000 arrive already taught, with a bracelet record of 6 in front of them and a money list that has a name at the top to beat.
