Vanessa Selbst, female poker player, quietly works for Jane Street
If you haven't heard of Vanessa Selbst, you probably don't play poker.
Five years ago, Selbst was nominated "the most successful female player in the history of poker" by the New York Times. Over a 12-year poker period, she won nearly $12m.
In 2018, Selbst was working for hedge fund Bridgewater after giving up her life of "endless hours grinding at felt tables in casinos from Barcelona to Melbourne."
Today, Selbst is somewhere else. Sources say she's working for Jane Street, the electronic trading firm that's been on a big hiring spree.
Jane Street isn't commenting. It's not entirely clear when Selbst joined, but last year she Tweeted that her current employer (Jane Street) was interested in hiring poker players who wanted trading jobs in New York City.
Jane Street likes to hire mathematics graduates who came top of their years at the likes of Cambridge, Imperial or MIT. It pays them extravagantly and they typically stay a long time.
Selbst graduated in law from Yale, but is a legend in the poker community. In a Reddit AMA in 2013 she imparted that if you want to get good at poker, you need to put in the time to playing online. "Take a few months and go live in Canada, Mexico, Europe, wherever," advised Selbst. "Play cash games, always making sure that you have 100x the buyin for the stakes you want to play."
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