But what I should have spent more time on was another player who stole the show from me: Alexandra Botez. Alex is a Twitch chess streamer and a very popular internet personality, and he has a great story:
Alexandra Valeria Botez is an American-Canadian chess player and commentator, Twitch streamer and YouTuber. As a player, she became the five-time national girls’ champion of Canada and won the U.S. women’s national team at the age of 15. She achieved her highest FIDE Elo score of 2092 in March 2016, and currently holds the title of the FIDE International Women’s Chess Federation. .
So she’s very brilliant, she’s struggled to become one of the best chess players in the world, and now she’s making the transition to the world of poker, which makes a lot of sense, because there’s a lot of money to win at poker. And last night was more or less her party in the poker world, winning a pot after a huge pot, much to the chagrin of Phil Hellmuth, who scolded her all night for making a good call. She took it easy and gave it back to him a bit, but like most people, he tried not to irritate Phil too much because he is finally good for the game. He left last night with $ 456,900, not bad for 6 hours of work.
Alex is the perfect ambassador for poker: she is charismatic, very bright, good at the game and a very attractive woman. It is the perfect combination for everyone to be interested in the game: men, women and children alike.
Last night’s game has not only taken the poker world by storm, but it is making waves on the Internet. When you have 2 of the most famous internet personalities of all time, Mr. Beast and Ninja, playing poker, people will watch it. In addition, it played on the Ludwig Channel and has over 1 million views in 15 hours.
I won’t say that last night was the beginning of the 2.0 poker boom, but it was certainly the beginning of something. It will take time to find out exactly what the beginning was, but today there are many more people interested in poker than yesterday. Without legal online poker across the country, it’s hard to have a boom as big as the Moneymaker effect, but the more you look at the game, the better. Hopefully this is the beginning of things to come.
