Liv Boeree’s $2.8 million score at WSOP Paradise in December catapulted her back into the poker spotlight, as she adopted a new approach and mindset that has seen her fall back in love with poker once more after several years spent focused on other pursuits.
Boeree is the latest top player to join Craig Tapscott for an in-depth discussion in our regular podcast series, The Interview. The hour-long episode will be available tomorrow at PokerOrg, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts, but we've grabbed another sneak peek for you, below.
Boeree partly ascribes her recent success to a new, more open-minded attitude to the workings of the world, and a willingness to experiment, trust her instincts and have fun at the tables. During the hour-long interview Boeree - a trained scientist with an honors degree in physics and astrophysics - shares a fascinating story about how her worldview was rocked by an encounter with something her rational mind found difficult to comprehend.
And it happened, as these things sometimes do, at Burning Man.
Boeree tells her story...
'There's more going on than conventional physics tells us'
I started developing an inner ear problem, strangely enough it was actually at the World Series of 2018 it started really manifesting. In my right ear, any man's voice - except for [partner and fellow poker player] Igor’s, interestingly - would become incredibly distorted and horrible. It was really rough, I had to stop playing, I just couldn't do anything social because it was very, very uncomfortable, and there was some deafness that came with it, and this weird muffling sound.
I went to various doctors and they said I’d lost some low frequency hearing and I might have this thing called Ménière's disease, which is basically where the nerve cells in the inner ear die. It's irreversible, you eventually end up deaf and you also get these terrible dizzy spells, it's just a horrible disease and there's no known cure.
I proceeded to keep getting these attacks of distortion and deafness, and then I was at Burning Man a few months later and I had for the first time one of the dizzy spells with nausea and vomiting, and it was just a real low moment.
On the last night of Burning Man I get talking to this girl; I'm sad and she’s, like, ‘What's the matter?’ I say ‘Well, I've got this problem and I don't know what to do’. She was a very, you know, ‘feminine, witchy, sensitive’ type person - as you could imagine. She says she does energy healing and would I like her to take a look?
I was so skeptical of that stuff. I was, like, ‘This is nonsense’, but at this point I was so desperate. And whatever, yeah, I'm at Burning Man: if not now, then when?
She puts her hand over my ear and says ‘There's something there’ and she leans in with her mouth and starts doing this weird sucking thing over my ear, it was incredibly uncomfortable. I was like, ‘Please stop!’ and she says ‘There's something there, I need to get it’. Then after a couple of minutes she collapses on the ground, crying and shaking. She was terrified.
After a while she comes around and says ‘That was very intense, but whatever it was, it's gone’. She said I’d have physical symptoms for another couple of weeks and then be fine, and that's exactly what happened.
As far as I'm concerned that’s as close to a miraculous healing as I could imagine. There are many explanations for this, and I've heard everything ranging from ‘You had a demon sucked out of your ear’ to ‘This is the power of the placebo effect’. I don't know which one I subscribe to, I think there's elements of truth in all of it.
Looking back on it, I think I needed an experience as extreme and as scary as that to rattle my cage enough to realize there's more going on than conventional physics tells us.
The full episode of The Interview with Liv Boeree drops tomorrow.
Images courtesy of PokerGO Tour/Antonio Abrego/WSOP/Christopher Michel/Torroid
