Longtime cash game grinder Danielle Andersen and CardsChat Podcast host Robbie Strazynski met virtually last week in her Las Vegas home for an insightful conversation about life, family, and poker.
In this week’s episode of the CardsChat podcast, Andersen opens up to Strazynski about her less-than-certain career path — from the gray market days of online poker before Black Friday to the current age of COVID — and gets personal about the challenges of balancing motherhood and being a good wife and partner to her husband while managing a career as a professional card player.
Growing up in a town of just 1,200 people in rural Minnesota, Andersen got started playing the small stakes online at Full Tilt as “dmoongirl” before graduating to the high-stakes grind while isolated far from the rest of the poker world.
“I didn’t have a peer network of poker player friends,” she says. “I was doing my thing, by myself.”
Andersen and Strazynski discuss her move to Las Vegas after Black Friday and the pressures from friends and family to stay in Minnesota, get a “real” job (she has a nursing degree) and live a more “standard” life.
“The bigger risk is to stay in an environment that you are not very happy with, and you’re not living a very fulfilled life,” Andersen says. “To me, that’s the riskiest thing we can do.”
On the podcast, she talks about rising from total obscurity to becoming poker-famous after starring in the 2013 documentary about online poker pros “Bet Raise Fold.” She addresses her initial reluctance to participate in the film project and the calculations that ultimately led her to let the poker world into her private family life.
As is standard on “the friendliest poker podcast in town,” some topics came from the CardsChat community via this forum thread, where Strazynski is now seeking questions for British poker pro Benny Glaser, who will be a guest on an upcoming episode.
