It’s after midnight in October in Sandnes, Norway, a quiet town of 40,000. Most residents are asleep. Windows are dark. But in one suburban house there’s a faint blue glow in the living room. Annette Obrestad, a round-faced 20-year-old with long brown hair and short bangs, is just getting started.
While her mother snoozes down the hall, Obrestad multitasks at her computer. Instant messages chime on the screen. Emails march down her inbox. She gabs on the cell phone pressed against her ear. She’s playing a game too—online poker. In fact, she’s not just playing one hand of No Limit Texas Hold’em, her preferred variation, she’s playing eight. Simultaneously. “Sometimes I play as many as 12,” she says as she places a bet, “but tonight I’m feeling a little jet-lagged.”
Obrestad just flew in from a tournament in Canada and will leave later this week for a competition in Budapest. In the male-dominated world of online poker, she’s the Miley Cyrus—a girly young superstar whose meteoric rise from teen queen to major player has taken this culture and industry by storm.
Since winning $9 in an online poker game as an underage 15-year-old, she has gone on to earn more than $3 million in online games and live tournaments. This includes last September’s astonishing $2 million win at the first World Series of Poker Europe in London—the biggest single event payday ever for a female poker player. Obrestad now has a manager—and a sponsor, online gambling site BetFair. Though the terms are undisclosed, sponsorships for major players are said to reach the millions. In return, Obrestad wears the site’s logos during competition, poses in fashion spreads, and blogs strategy advice on the company’s site.
Richard Brauch, a spokesman for BetFair, says it’s not just Obrestad’s skills that make her appealing. She’s a squeaky-clean star in a world some find unseemly—just the qualities the industry needs to lure a new generation of players. The online poker industry is still reeling after the United State Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006, which banned transfer funds to online gaming accounts. In the wake, one of the biggest online gambling sites, PartyGaming, lost an estimated 60% of its value. While the online poker industry has revenues of about $18 billion worldwide, young European players like Obrestad are seen as a way to entice new players into the game.
“She’s not a wild child,” Brauch says, “she projects a dream to aspire to. When people want to start playing poker, she’s someone they can look up to.” As one of poker’s most iconic female players, 43-year-old Annie Duke, put it after losing to Obrestad: “She’s already a terrifying player and one of the most talented I have ever seen. In five to 10 years, holy crap!”
