Poker Player - Jennifer "Jennicide" Leigh
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There are certain assumptions one might make when seeing Jennifer Leigh for the first time. Yes she is young, blonde and has a smile likely to dazzle anyone in the room. You may think she's cute. Judging by her taste in sparkly, expensive designer clothes you may assume she is perhaps the daughter of a wealthy business man? Perhaps even an actress or model? But a professional poker player? Surely not! Everyone knows that poker is a man's game, men sitting about in jeans and T-shirts, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and talking about football, isn't it? With Jennifer Leigh we are once again reminded never to judge a book by its cover. Jennifer Leigh is one of the most respected, and most popular female poker players around, and hey, she just happens to be young, blond and gorgeous, Jennifer Leigh seems to have it all.
Born August 10th 1983, in Wilmington, Delaware, Jennifer is a former law student turned professional poker player. She attended the University of Delaware studying philosophy and political science and started playing poker completely by chance. Jennifer Leigh has often admitted that she was a total nerd when she was growing up. At a fairly young age Jennifer got into video game, in particular Role Playing games (RPGs) and basically lived her life on the computer. Jennifer has said it was her long experience with computer based RPGs that mad her siege into the elusive world of professional poker an easy transition, in fact it was through her RPGs and their massive online community that she was introduced to poker. With online video games becoming more and more popular, most online games now have their own online communities where you can chat to other players, discuss game tips and strategies and so on. Jennifer began chatting to other players and one of the fellow gamers she met online turned out to be the younger brother of a poker pro - Robert Boyd, brother of Dutch Boyd and so it was Robert Boyd who introduced Jennifer Leigh to the game of poker.
Jennifer Leigh started her poker career playing $5 Sit N Go. She won her first ever game and it was this that thrilled her into finding out more, the next week she went out and purchased around twenty poker books in order to try and learn the game in more depth. She bought book after book on the game and started to cram as only a student truly knows how to do. Jennifer was very studious in school. She was a pre-law major at college so learning and reading have always gone hand in hand for her - another reason why she refers to herself as a total nerd. However Jennifer soon found out that it's extremely difficult to cram both poker and school at the same time and so it wasn't long before her schoolwork began to suffer and her grades began to slip. As her grades continued to slump, Jennifer decided it was time to leave school. By this time she had worked her way up from $5 sit N Go to playing $100/200 limit poker online at PokerStars.com so since she was able to pay her bills with her proceeds from poker, she decided to give professional poker a go.
Jennifer Leigh began playing poker online at PokerStars.com in January 2004. Later that same year she ended up ranked 47 on the PokerStars tournament board, making her the highest ranked female and most successful online woman poker player. This was a huge accomplishment for Jennifer who had at the time been playing poker for less than a year. Since then Jennifer has moved up to jet setting around the world to play games as well as putting up thousands of dollars a hand on occasions, as well as appearing on Poker Royale and other nationally televised poker events in Las Vegas. She has had five 1st place finishes on PokerStars and over twenty final table appearances. Jennifer is currently focused on playing live tournaments all over the world and pays her own way into tournament games funded by her continuous success at her $100/200 online games. Not bad. For a former nerd who had at the time been playing poker for less than a year. Jennifer claims it is really about the competition for her and not about the monetary effects - well what else would you expect from a video game junkie? Jennifer hasn't been playing poker for that long especially when you consider that some poker pros such as Minneapolis Jim Meehan have been playing the game for over forty years. There's no doubting that Jennifer Leigh is fairly new to the pro poker circuit but boy has she made an impact.
Jennifer attributes a lot of her success to the experience she gained while playing poker online and her RPGs she was so addicted to as a young girl. Jennifer has been known to spend a whole day playing 7 to 8 different online tournaments, something she doesn't regret at all as the number of hands she saw and all that she learnt made the time worthwhile. Her RPGs have certainly prepared her for the often harsh world of tournament poker, as a former EverQuest (online RPG) junkie she use to sit through 48 hour sessions playing that, so long endurance games are nothing new to her. And to think that someone once said that you can't learn anything useful from a video game!
Her nickname, 'Jennicide' came about during her years as a nerd. Jennifer used to belong to a few hacking groups - although not the malicious ones - and Jennicide was the alias she used for all the online discussion groups, a bit like a computer username - and the name just stuck with her as she made her transition into the world of professional poker.
Away from the poker tables Jennifer Leigh still likes to play video games as well as shopping and travelling. Jennifer is definitely someone to keep an eye out for on the tournament trail; although she is still fairly young at 22 it is clear she has a very successful poker career ahead of her.
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