Strategic card games like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon TCG have paved the way to poker for many of the game’s greatest thinkers. For Philadelphia’s Jen Shahade, the route to poker came via the most famous strategy game in the world: chess.
Shahade was only 17 when she became the first female winner of the US Junior Open, and just 21 when she won the US Women’s Chess Championship. She would go on to win the title again in 2004, before writing her first book on chess in 2005, going on to hold senior roles at organizations including the US Chess Federation, the World Chess Hall of Fame and the chess charity 9 Queens, which she co-founded.
Her love of poker saw her named PokerStars’ ambassador for mindsports in 2014, a year which also saw her win €100,000 for victory in the TonyBet Open Face Chinese Poker World Championship High Roller. She has gone on to work as a poker coach for the training site Run It Once.
With some tournament wins on her resume, as well as final table appearances in WPT and EPT events, Shahade has demonstrated the same focus and passion for poker that she brings to chess, a game in which she is ranked as a Women’s Grandmaster.
She is a strong advocate for teaching strategic thinking to girls and inner-city youth, and is the host of The Poker Grid podcast, a series of 169 episodes examining every possible two-card starting hand in Texas Hold’em.
