“After a decade playing professional poker, I just won my first $1-million score”

I was born in China in 1985 and grew up in a tumultuous time of political unrest. My uncle was an academic doing his grad studies in Canada, so he sponsored my mother to join him in Winnipeg in 1988, with the hope that we could eventually get our entire family out. My mom arrived in Canada with $30 in her pocket. She moved to Toronto and worked odd jobs in parking lots and at fast food restaurants. Eventually, in 1990, she was able to sponsor my grandma, my dad and me.

I’ve always loved games of skill and chance. When I was five years old, I started playing Chinese chess with my grandma—or any adult who was around—and eventually moved on to chess. I was obsessed with the strategy of the game, and I liked that, while I could learn the rules in a few minutes, it would take a long time to master. I was attracted to the mystery of games that involved playing with known and unknown variables.

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After high school, I studied social development at the University of Waterloo, thinking I would pursue a career in international relations or maybe law. Around that time, in the early aughts, I saw poker being played on TV in shows like Poker After Dark and High Stakes Poker. It was the beginning of a golden age for televised poker because hole cameras that allowed viewers to see players’ cards had recently come on the scene.

I was completely fascinated by the game. All the players looked like cowboys, and they were playing cards for millions of dollars. I didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and seeing how much was being won inspired me to start playing. I thought, Sure, these guys are talented, but they’re not doing anything I can’t do. I dove in head first and read every book on poker strategy I could find.

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I began winning games early on. I started playing limit Texas hold ’em, which evolved into no-limit Texas hold ’em. Initially, I played with friends at home using $100 buy-ins. Sometimes we drove to the Brantford Charity Casino to play low-stakes games. I didn’t have to work very hard to perfect my poker face. And being a first-generation immigrant meant I had learned English from scratch, which required paying close attention to other people’s body language, so I found it easy to read my opponents at the table.

After a few months, I started running my own home game out of the four-plex I rented off campus with roommates in Waterloo. The participants were mostly students, but a few poker enthusiasts from the community came too. I tried to make it a weekly event, but most people wanted to play more often than that. Every time we ran a game, I would make a few hundred dollars. By the time we were playing every night, staying up as late as 5 a.m., I started to skip classes.

I got pretty serious about using my poker winnings to pay my way through school, but it was a catch-22: when I started undergrad, I was on a scholarship, but because of my new hobby, I failed to meet the academic requirements to maintain that financial support. One semester, I got put on academic probation, so I decided to take the term off and went to Niagara Falls, where I lived in a hostel and played poker at the casino non-stop for four months to cover my tuition. I was putting more and more money on the line, moving up to $500 and $1,000 buy-ins.

At the same time, I was playing and winning a lot of online poker. There’s all sorts of data you can extrapolate from your games, so I posted my statistics on poker forums and found investors who would give me money up front in exchange for a stake in my winnings. For events with more expensive buy-ins, like $10,000, I might have sold 75 per cent of the stake, meaning I had to pay only $2,500 to enter, but I would get to keep only 25 per cent of my winnings.

I graduated from Waterloo in 2012. In addition to playing poker, I started swing trading and studying to be a chartered financial analyst to appease my mom, who wanted me to follow a more stable career path. When I was 27, my mom told me that my time playing games had to come to an end: I could travel for a year playing poker, but after that, I’d have to settle down and find a real job. I took my $50,000 in savings from poker wins and went to Europe in 2012, where there were more events and more prestige to be found than in North America. I travelled around Italy, Spain, France, the UK, Ireland, Germany and Czechia, taking as many risks as I could.

I played way beyond my budget, knowing that this was my last chance to make something out of the game. It worked: I ended up with two half-a-million-dollar scores. I didn’t get to keep all of the money because I had sold a stake in my winnings to investors, but it was a way of proving to my mom and to myself that I could do it. After that year, she allowed me to keep playing, though she still would have preferred if I’d become an accountant.

I continued playing more and more—both online and in tournaments—and was doing pretty well. In 2013, I was named one of the World Poker Tour’s “Ones to Watch,” and I started working with brands like 888 Poker and Natural8 to promote their sites. But, by 2017, I was feeling burnt out. I had just gotten out of a difficult relationship, and that combined with the stress of poker was completely draining. I needed to isolate myself for a while. I decided to get my real estate licence and sold commercial real estate in Toronto until 2022, when Poker Power, a start-up designed to teach the game to women, reached out and asked me to become an instructor and board member. I accepted, and working with other women reinvigorated my passion for the game, so I found my way back to the table.

Since I started taking poker seriously, I’ve never made less than $100,000 a year, but I don’t consider it to be a full-time job. A lot of players choose this line of work because it offers flexibility and freedom they wouldn’t find in a nine to five. I like to travel, eat at restaurants and play golf just as much as I like to play cards. If I get called up to a high-stakes game in London or China, I can drop everything and fly there. And even if I don’t have a live game, I can play online whenever I feel like it. Another unexpected perk has been meeting cool people all over the world. I’ve played against fascinating opponents like Jennifer Tilly, the actor known for playing the Bride of Chucky and starring in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

In the early days of my career, I was quite irresponsible with my winnings, paying for family trips to Europe, the Bahamas and Las Vegas. Growing up without much money and suddenly having so much of it at my disposal, I was quickly caught up in all the new opportunities. I went broke one year because I lived beyond my means, playing bigger and bigger buy-ins. Even when you win big, once you factor in expenses like travel, it doesn’t always amount to much.

These days, I’m more serious about playing smart and staying financially stable since I don’t plan on playing poker forever. I’ve had only one losing year since I started playing, in 2022—it came down to losing one huge pot that took me from financially successful to in the red by $200,000. But that setback was followed by one of my best years ever.

Now, my career is peaking. This year, I had my biggest score yet, winning the $25,000 World Poker Tournament Global Slam and bringing home a grand total of $1,175,000. It felt surreal to beat the best tournament poker players in the world. Winning at that level has always been one of my goals, and becoming the first woman to do so was a huge confidence boost.

There’s a famous line in the 1998 poker movie Rounders: “In the poker game of life, women are the rake.” The rake is the cut of each hand taken by the house, and the quote implies that women are nothing more than an annoyance. To this day, misogyny is pervasive in the poker world. Women represent less than 10 per cent of professional poker players. Sometimes men will try to throw us off our game by saying gross things. I’ve been told that “my aggression is not going to find me a husband.” Most of the time I just laugh it off.

When I teach other women to play poker, I always tell them: don’t be afraid to look silly. It’s kind of like a beginner going to the gym. You may be self-conscious and feel out of place at first, but as long as you keep going—and play responsibly—almost everything you do at the poker table can be turned into a positive, whether as a learning experience or a financial reward.

Before I retire, I would love to win the EGOT of poker: the World Poker Tour Championship, a World Series of Poker bracelet and a European Poker Tour, which are some of the most prestigious tournaments you can play. I want to continue to grow the game and inspire and empower other women to play. As women, we tend to try to be more prepared when we take shots at things that we’re not good at. But, when you sit down at the table, especially in lower-stakes games, you have a lot of men who don’t know what they’re doing and are just winging it. I want to show women that it’s okay to take risks. When you do, something great may happen.