Two-time U.S. chess champion and PokerStars mind games ambassador, Jennifer Shahade, is so skilled in both games that she easily multitabled both! One of her most recent videos included a simultaneous session of online poker and heads-up bullet chess.
At the heart of it, poker is just a game. It's just one of the rare games in which people play each other for millions of dollars. I'm sure if Monopoly or Scrabble were lucrative and played for both low and high stakes on a global level, then we'd be watching the World Series of Monopoly every summer. For many poker pros, they excelled at other games before the got into poker. These games range include chess, backgammon, StarCraft, and gin rummy.
Card games have also been a gateway drug for poker. Stuey Ungar was a gin wunderkind as a teenager. He crushed games in New York City, but it was just a stopover of Ungar's journey to Las Vegas to become of one of the most feared no-limit hold'em players in the history of the game.
Some of the biggest TV stars at the height of the poker boom, Dan Harrington and Erik Seidel, first caught the competitive wave while playing chess at The Players Club in New York City. Gus Hansen's love of backgammon eventual led him to poker. ElkY was a Rockstar in South Korea as a professional gamer.
Jennifer Shahade is one of the most talented people I've ever met. She's a poker player, chess Grandmaster, and author from Philadelphia. Shahade is current a mind games ambassador for PokerStars. She first made waves in the chess world when she won the Junior Open. A couple of years later in 2002, she won the U.S. Women's Championship for the first time. Shahade won the Women's Championship twice and earned the coveted title of Grandmaster.
In 2005, Poker Bitch by Jennifer Shahade was published. The tagline was: “Women In The Ultimate Intellectual Sport.” Even Yoko Ono blurbed it saying… “One woman's fascinating true story of the life of a champion chess player. All women should take up the challenge and pick up a board! Chess anyone?”
Jennifer Shahade crushes two realms. She's a killer chess player and equally strong poker player. She recently put her multi-tabling skills to the test by playing both online poker and online chess….simultaneously. It's not uncommon for top chess players to play simultaneous games against a dozen opponents, or engage in heads-up speed chess or bullet chess. And in the online poker world, multi-tabling is extremely common. Some of the top pros can play 15-20 at a time with ease. Heck, ElkY once set a record for playing 62 tables in an hour! But how many people can do both? And how about “bullet chess” which is the equivalent of a hyper-turbo in poker with 60 seconds of total clock time?
Watch Jennifer Shahade play a simultaneous session of online poker and bullet chess…
Two-time U.S. chess champion and PokerStars mind games ambassador, Jennifer Shahade, is so skilled in both games that she easily multitabled both! One of her most recent videos included a simultaneous session of online poker and heads-up bullet chess.
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Two-time U.S. chess champion and PokerStars mind sports ambassador Jennifer Shahade
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