Vanessa Selbst, one of the most successful female poker players recently announced that she has parted ways with PokerStars. She has decided to quit playing professional poker for a living and is looking to pursue a career in finance.

Selbst has been a member of Team PokerStars for a number of years and is recognized as one of the best female poker pros in the world. The 33-year-old New York native says that she had several reasons for quitting poker including too much travel and the fact that the competition has become a lot tougher making it harder to win these days.

Selbst Isn’t a Fan of the Excessive Traveling

She’s not the first successful poker player to retire from the game, with players like Jens Kyllönen (also known as “Jeans89”) and Fedor Holz (also known as “CrownUpGuy”) also retiring themselves, only to end up playing poker again not long after. However, it seems that in the case of Selbst, her move away from professional poker is going to be permanent. She is looking at starting a career as a hedge fund manager and will only play poker as a hobby going forward.

Selbst took to Facebook to come up with a long post explaining her reasoning from walking away from the game that has brought her tremendous success. She says that it has now become extremely hard for U.S poker players to continue to make living playing online poker due to the fact that it is banned in most states. The only option is to move overseas and that is not something she is willing to do right now.

The second option is for poker players to travel across the world on a regular basis to play the top poker tournaments in the world. Selbst does not want to take on a rigorous travel schedule right now as her priorities are different. She wants to start a family soon, settle down and have a normal life.

Poker Requires Discipline And Hard Work To Succeed

One of the other reasons for her walking away from poker and quitting Team PokerStars is because she doesn’t feel comfortable about being a poker ambassador anymore or promoting gambling. She doesn’t believe that the game of poker is very rewarding for young amateur players anymore. Instead, she feels like the opposite is true and poker has become tougher for non-pros to get into and be successful. She also claims that playing poker feels like a real tedious job for her at this point in her life and she does not seem to be having fun like in years past.

Selbst admits that she isn’t sure whether this attitude change regarding poker came about because she herself has become older or poker itself has become more competitive. While she will no longer play professional poker, she will still play poker as a hobby. She will stop playing professional poker from 2018.

She hasn’t outlined any solid plans towards her new career but has mentioned her desire to be a hedge fund manager.                                                                     

Tags: hedge fund, PokerStars, Professional Poker, Team Pokerstars, Vanessa Selbst

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018 at 12:59 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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