Interview With Liv Boeree

In 2005, Liv Boeree learned the ropes of Texas holdem in front of a U.K. television audience on the reality show Ultimate Poker Showdown. Under the guidance of several pro players, she grew from a physics student with no knowledge of the game to an upstart pro with the poker chops and star power to land in magazines from Cardplayer to Maxim. In 2010, she cemented her place as an international threat with a €1.25 million first-place win at the San Remo European Poker Tour. THP caught up with her in Vegas as she worked her way through the World Series of Poker.

You’ve had a very interesting introduction to the game. Can you talk about that experience a little bit?

Sure. I learned to play on the reality TV show about five years ago. It really introduced me to the world of poker and all the glamour of it. I hung out with Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke and Devilfish. I saw what they did, decided that’s what I wanted to do and just started building my way up from there. All three of them gave us lessons during the show. And after it was over, Annie Duke took me under her wing and taught me a lot in the years following. I spent a week with her at her house in L.A., and it was brilliant – she helped my game so much.

Of the group, did you connect most with her?

Yeah, she’s probably the person I know best - my closest friend. I adore all three of them. Devilfish always supports me. He’ll ring me up to tell me "well done", and Phil Hellmuth came up and gave me a big hug after I won San Remo. They’re all great people.

You went to school for astrophysics - why did you choose that field?

That’s what I was good at in school, basically. In high school, math and science was what I liked. It was a natural progression for me... physics was just what I was most interested in. I genuinely did want to become a research scientist at the time, when I was 18, going to college. That’s what I studied, and I loved it. Even now, I’m still very interested in it, though unfortunately I haven’t really been keeping in touch with it that much and keeping my math as good as it should be. But it’s all still in there somewhere...

So, what’s the most mind-blowing thing you’ve learned about the universe?

[Laughs] Oh, there are so many cool things. The fact that we can infer that the universe is finite is pretty mind-boggling. Like, if there’s a limit to the universe, then what’s outside of that? The logic behind the idea is pretty long and convoluted, but there are various bits of evidence, like the Big Bang Theory. Basically that something had to exist outside the universe in order for it to be created. And then there’s the evidence supporting the Big Bang, such as the cosmic microwave background, redshift and blueshift galaxies and other various bits of evidence to support it.

So why did you end up playing poker instead of solving the mysteries of time and space?

Basically, I didn’t discover poker until after I’d graduated, and I didn’t know really what I wanted to do with my life - which is why I applied for the TV show. Then once I started playing poker, I realized how much I loved the game, and it sort of gave me the direction I wanted.

How hard is it to learn to play poker with a TV audience?

When you’re taught the rules an hour before you start the game, that’s pretty tough. But at the same time, everybody else was in the same boat. All five of us had never played poker before. But it wasn’t that bad; I’d consider that significantly lower pressure than the stuff I’m doing now [laughs].

What were the major milestones you needed to get over?

Annie’s lessons were the most helpful part. She taught me everything like the importance of position, why we raise, that you have to justify everything you do. I learned that you have to have a plan for every street of the hand and any possibility that could happen. Anything your opponent could do, you have to have that accounted for and have a plan in advance. She really helped me with the logic and game-theory side of poker. I think more recently, I’ve been working more on stack-size strategy - that was something I’d become a bit lazy on. I wasn’t always forecasting what sort of stack size I’d need to do this move on the turn and so on. And I’d find myself doing all these silly things that I didn’t have the room to do with my stack size. It’s helped my game a lot, and again it’s really about planning throughout the hand.

Can you describe your mental checklist of how you approach a hand and what questions you’re asking yourself?

Well, the biggest factors are my position at the table and the action in front of me. Then my stack size compared to my opponents who have already made an action as well as the opponents behind me. Is there someone up there with 16 big blinds who’s looking to shove? Then, depending on what I decide to do, the flop texture comes into play. Then I think, “What have my opponents done before? Have I seen anything with betting frequency? What do their previous bet-sizing amounts mean?” Then there’s my image to my opponents, what they’ve seen me do before and how that affects their thinking... that’s all part of the list.

Who are you learning from these days?

I’m having most of my poker discussions with my group of friends, like Sean Bean, Allie Prescott, Jeff Madsen. I have a really great close-knit group of friends over here in the U.S. who are all great poker minds and have really been helping me change my style a lot. And the results are paying off. It’s really good to discuss hands with other people - even though they often have differing opinions – so having a good group of friends who play is very important.

Between poker and astrophysics, it sounds like you’re committed to a geeky profession...

I guess it is kind of geeky. You see these groups of young people, discussing hands nonstop. We’re all poker nerds. A lot of people have scientific backgrounds in poker. We study it closely, and I guess anybody who studies something so logical and academic is kinda geeky.

Have you met any other physicists in the pros?

Yeah, my friend Michael Binger was a physicist as well. He has a Phd and specialized in particle physics, I think. There’s a bunch of us actually. He’s significantly better at physics than I am - a lot more... decorated, shall I say. He’s probably better at poker, too.