“Years ago when I played WSOP, I would come in at six in the morning from playing all night, enter all my trades, trade the open and then go to sleep, wake up for market close.” It’s just, at a poker table, or in the financial markets.”īecause her models are mostly automated and she can work from anywhere, she can sneak a lot of poker into her schedule. It’s almost identical because it’s just calculated risk-taking. I mean, I could go on for days about the parallels. “Bankroll management, mathematics, psychology. We asked Roberts about some of those parallels between the trading and poker worlds. But the concepts are identical, so my background helps me in poker.” When you’re all in, there is no hedging, there is no insurance. “In the markets, I can hedge my downside. She says she is thankful she doesn't have to play for a living, but has the utmost admiration for those who do, as she understands how hard it must be. That’s how she makes her living, but poker is her passion. With a bachelor’s in Computer Graphics and an MBA, both from Carnegie Mellon University, Roberts used to run a hedge fun and now trades her own capital using systematic models based on data and statistics - models she developed herself. But in between battling the best of the best in high stakes cash games, Roberts can be found trading equities and derivatives in the stock market. You've seen her playing in big cash games on Poker After Dark on PokerGO and before that, frequenting WSOP, WPT and Super High Roller Bowl tournaments.

He also plays poker and he's the one that eventually got her into the game that she would fall in love with. In addition to being encouraged to pursue math and science, Roberts grew up in casinos and her dad counted cards. in Physics from MIT and then, from an immigrant family, he made something in science, so that was the only place I was going to go.” I was the oldest, and my dad came from nothing, didn’t have shoes to get married in.

“I was just raised like a boy,' she tells PokerNews.

And she aims to change that last part too. That child-rearing pattern did not follow for the upbringing of Lauren Roberts. The fact that those fields are made up of majority men with the culture that comes with that at times is yet another deterrent for women to join - and let's be honest - the same goes for poker. In the U.S., it is usually the boys in the family who are encouraged to pursue math and science, starting early on with the toys they receive as young ones.

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