Vanessa Selbst

Vanessa (AKA fslexcduck) has been playing poker since she was a kid‚ owning fools in her high school home games. She sucked pretty hard back then, but she sucked less than everyone else, and managed to pay for lunch money, or whatever else you have to buy in high school. She moved on to a serious approach to the game in the fall of 2004 while studying at Yale University, discovered the 2+2 forums, and within 6 months had built up a bankroll to play 10-20 and 25-50 online. She's been playing in all limits since then, as low as 1-2 when the mood arises, and as high as 25-50-100-200-400 in some crazy NYC games. She has coached well over 40 students, many of whom have enjoyed great success. She loves coaching for many reasons, one of which is that it helps to alleviate the monotony of NL cash. She is currently working on expanding her playing repertoire to include live tournaments and other types of poker, such as Omaha high-low and mixed games.

Vanessa is a DeucesCracked Executive Producer.

Q. What type of poker do you like the most and what type are you best at? A. I think that relative to the field, I'm best at HU NL cash, and it isn't really close. My hand-reading is my best attribute as a poker player, and I have very good intuition about the metagame in each situation. I'm also great at inducing opponents to make the moves I want them to make. All of those qualities make for a very solid HU game. I also have a very good 6max game, and as the games have become more aggressive, I've found them to be much closer to HU than they used to be. People are playing each other rather than their cards more so than they were before, so metagame and hand-reading have become more difficult to master--and more important than ever before.

Q. Why do you coach and what do you like about it? A. I first got involved with coaching as a way to change things up a little bit from just playing all the time. I have done a ton of tutoring throughout my life, and I find myself always trying to explain things, often in a pedantic way‚Ä¶ so I figured it made a lot of sense to do it professionally and help people with it. Coaching challenges me as it not only makes me think about how to analyze poker situations, but it forces me to come up with different ways of explaining the same situation, as students learn very differently. Coaching also makes me think critically about the game far more than I otherwise would, and I've actually learned a lot myself from constantly revisiting the same concepts and hearing input from my students. As a result, I'm a better player for it, and in turn a better coach. I get very personally invested in the progress of the students I coach ‚Äì I check up on them and make myself available outside of lesson times as much as I can. Nothing gives me more satisfaction as a coach than to see a student who was playing 2-4 now playing 10-20 and sending me hand histories with an IM that says "look, I incorporated xxx move, and see how well it worked out!" What can I say? These days, I actually prefer coaching to playing and just have a ton of fun with it.

Q. What the heck does your screen name even mean? A. I made it in 7th grade, before AOL let you have more than 10 letters in your screen name-- you know, the old school days where you actually subscribed to America Online and paid by the minute. Switch the d and the f and sound it out: you'll get there. I thought I was quite the clever one back then.

Q. I've heard rumors that you advocate a "life outside of poker." What does that mean for you? A. I have never actually had a period in my life where I've been just a professional poker player. I've always been doing something else at the same time. As an intellectual, I would just get bored if I weren't doing many things at once. When I graduated college, I studied in Madrid on a Fulbright Scholarship (though I spent too much of my time in Spain just playing poker: the good old Party 10-20 days), and then came back thinking I would leave poker for the working world. That didn't actually pan out, the working thing, so I decided to play on the WPT tour. I travel for poker about half of the time on the tour playing tournaments and cash games, but when I'm home I spend my time doing other things. Besides coaching and making videos for DeucesCracked, I volunteer 2-3 days per week at a non-profit organization in Brooklyn, I do improv comedy, I play in a basketball league, and I write. Next year I'll be going to law school (for better or worse) to eventually become a human rights lawyer. I really feel that poker players who have some sort of life outside of poker are much happier in the long run, both saving themselves from poker burnout as well as just being more well-rounded people. I'm into all of that hippie stuff, I guess we'll call it the metagame of life‚ which includes things like playing the stakes you want to play rather than feeling pressured to play as high as possible all the time, and spending your time doing other very meaningful things. It's made me happier once I started doing all of these other things, and I can quite honestly say I'm currently playing the best poker of my life, and it's largely in part to this new mindset I have.

Rate: $650
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