http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5841

I used to drool over her back in my chess playing days. She's def eye candy and I'm glad she's switching over to poker.

Forgot to add: she's sponsored by a site called 'Winamax', it's probably a french only site. She's going to be on the road for some EPT events and the WSOP.

People claim that Poker and Chess have a lot in common, in fact Backgammon and Poker are much closer together. The concept of playing trash like it was the absolute nuts is totally alien to Chess unless you want to compare it with incorrect sacrifices. The reason chessplayers are successful in poker is simply why they are usually highly intelligent and that goes especially for players at the IM/GM level.

Advertisement where companies link their product to Chess is well known, take the financial sector for example. Many Wall Street gamblers want to create the image that they are planning like a chessplayer and some people even believe them...

yup i don't think chess and poker have much in common either. there is a lot of interchange between Magic and Poker

Every other bank commercial has some donk in it who makes a chess move with a very determined expression, usually on a board where the lower left corner is a freaking light square. Tilts me to no end.

Also, Almira is hot, saw her some years ago at a bundesliga match playing some blitz games against former german football player Marco Bode.

Bode studied mathematics, so it isn't that surprising to see him playing chess also.

Yeah I totally agree with the statement that chess is not close to poker at all. When I switched over from chess I had to deprogram myself and that took a long time.

What I think that chess players bring to poker is their work ethic and the ability to study a game intensely for 8+ hours a day without the guarrantee of immediate success. Poker can be a very frustrating game, just like chess.

Unfortunately it looks like Almira is only interested in playing live tournaments and it doesn't seem readily apparent that she will be playing online. I think that really hurts her chances of becoming successful.

For chess players, I think the best chance for success is in an online setting with PT3/HEM software playing cash games. After the session the chess player can review their session and plug leaks just like they would do following a chess match.

I think they have one huge thing in common. You have to engage in certain activities to truly improve and just take it on blind faith that you're actually improving when doing so. You can do a thousand tactical problems and obviously lose your next 10 games. You can also works extremely diligently at your poker game and immediately go on a 20 buyin downer.

And both games have the ability to allow you to engage in other activities that will ruin your longterm potential, but allow you to see immediate 'improvement' in your game. Namely in chess memorizing openings is a quick fix, as in poker one can blaim his bad results on bad luck and his good results on skill. When suddenly you're only losing in chess when you got 'outbooked' and you're only losing in poker when you're 'unlucky'.

I think those two things make it very difficult for many people to reach high levels of success in either. Constant training without immediate gratification while avoiding other activities or even thought processes that can offer immediate gratification is seriously counter intuitive. But it's also the reason I think that people who have seen much success at either field will be vastly more likely than average to be able to achieve success in the other.

Wow, she looks like a Britney Spears look-alike here. Very cute.

I'd hit it.

Pretty much any time there is a WSOP broadcast I recognize several chess IM:s and one or two GM:s once in a while.
I would think that ABC poker is a lot easier than ABC chess.
How far you can get with abc-poker, I dont know.

From what Ive heard, the guys mentioned in the above article, and especially Grischuk are all pretty good.

Anyway chess in my country is pretty much dead nowadays.
Chessclubs are closing down or losing members.
Everyone is playing poker

Chess on Broadway did the same thing. It drove me nuts.

Winamax is part of ongame, but the team is french and it has mostly french players. She's been part of it for quite a while, 1yr and half or so. She does play some CG I think, as "Chessbabe" if I remember correctly, or at least she used to. Low/midstakes 2/4 or so I think, might have changed..
The first pic doesn't look at all like her. I used to go get drunk in a bar where she was coming sometimes, when I was younger. She had left Lautier, and she was dating Eloi Relange, another french GM who also switched to poker over the last years, but plays limit mostly.

I also don't think chess practice in itself brings anything helpful at all for poker. Besides patience maybe.. (ie long game chess players might feel more at ease in full ring and witha slid nit style than in more short handed games for a while).

Chess is mostly about geometric representation/visualisation mostly, and recognition of geometric patterns. And it teaches to consider any win as something done right (ie result oriented).
Poker is about observation of repetitive patterns (more like music rythm? nothing to do with geometric patterns), loss of ego, emotions control and acceptation of variance (very different from chess for that... ego isn't a problem in chess, especially if you're good and win a lot), psychology, understanding and playing and manipulating the opponent (this exists a little in chess too, you can chose a style of play and openings that doesn't feel comfy for a specific opponent, you can destabilize opponents in several ways, especially in fast games, but it's still very limited, and has less impact, compared to poker psychology), and finally agressivity (very present in chess too), disregard for money (not existing in chess), dissimulation/trickiness (also absent in chess).

There is one thing for which chess probably helps, though : there is also a very important form of abstraction in poker.. It's more numeric (related to counting?) than geometric, but strong chess players probably have a facility to deal with this. It concerns two things : first, the bet sizing, odds, stack sizes, etc.. planning your bet size to keep a good size for your river bet and all that.. and secondly, much more important and not as easy : figuring balance of ranges well (having rough estimates of how biased towards value or towards bluff a polarized range is in a specific situation etc, spoting unbalanced ranged of the opponent and keeping your own ranges balanced).

Backgammon is more of a gambling game like poker, no arguments there but it is no surprise good chess players are good poker players.

Good chess players are very smart so that means they will also be profitable poker players.

Chess is more a of a game of studying where poker improvement comes more from playing. Chess players are smart enough and patient enough to begin practising maybe even for years at micro levels they can beat. The standard gambling imbecile isn't capable of this.

I disagree - I think its the opposite. For me studying has lead to much more improvement in poker and playing much more improvement in chess.

I guess it depends on the opposition.
For me playing more would mean I get to play vs 200-400 lower rated players which is next to useless unless you feel an urgent need to donate rating points...