Kathleen ‘Kathy’ Liebert, also known online as ‘PokerKat’, was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1967. A graduate from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Liebert pursued a career as a Wall Street business analyst before starting to play $5 limit poker in Colorado in 1991. She was subsequently asked to ‘prop’ – that is, play poker for an hourly wage, but using her own bankroll – for a local casino, but it was another eighteen months or so before she headed to Las Vegas to play in a poker tournament.
Successful at low buy-in tournaments, but careful to play within her means, Liebert gradually worked her way up through the ranks. She recorded her first tournament win in a $200 + 30 Omaha Hi/Lo event at the LA Poker Open II at Normandie Casino, Gardena in 1994, but in two-and-a-half decades since has become one of the best poker players, of either sex, in the world. In 2002, she became the first women to win $1 million in a single event, when winning the $8,000 Limit Hold’em on the inaugural Party Poker Million Cruise. In 2004, she won her one and only World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet in the
$1,500 Limit Hold’em Shootout at Binion’s, Las Vegas. At the last count, Liebert had total live earnings in excess of $6.3 million.
