Vanessa Rousso Poker Strategy

Vanessa Rousso is among the top 5 most successful female poker players in the world. She's a colorful personality with many different accomplishments both inside and outside of the poker world. Lady Maverick managed to earn around $3,500,000 in live poker winnings throughout her career, and while she doesn't have any WSOP, WPT or EPT titles she cashed in all of those tournament circuits multiple times.

Vanessa is also a successful online grinder, in 2007, she earned over $700,000 with a runner-up finish in the main event of the WCOOP. Rousso also managed to gain a bit of mainstream fame by finishing third in the 17th season of the reality show Big Brother - perhaps the toughest donkament of them all! On top of that Lady Maverick is an avid music producer.

Lucky and Good!

This little three hand video compilation paints a clear picture of a very solid player who knows exactly how to behave with the top of her range.

In hand number one Vanessa made a somewhat questionable preflop call with A4o, though this kind of play is fairly common in a live poker setting and it might have been +EV assuming specific table dynamic involving weaker players sitting behind Rousso. Lady Maverick followed up her slightly controversial preflop decision with a very solid flop value bet after the initial raiser gave up his betting lead. The board offered a bunch of second pair type hand combinations, which was another great reason for betting.

The turn was a focal point of the hand. Lead from Clonie made very little sense for the subset of hands that Rousso was targeting on the flop with her value bet, and so she had to be fairly polarized. Even still Vanessa took her time to make the necessary calculations, considered the odds, no doubt realized that her hand blocked a bunch of two pair combinations on this particular board texture and decided to call. 

The river brought Rousso four of clubs improving her hand to aces up though it's important to point out that she wasn't too quick to make the call - and for a good reason. A4 still wasn't beating the majority of Clonie's value betting combos, but the river card did, in fact, improve Vanessa's relative hand strength a bit (particularly against JT) and if we add to that the fact that her opponent should be bluffing some percentage of the time in this spot, river call was the optimal choice.

Hand number two is a prime example of a spot that looks far less complicated than it actually is. Sure, flopping a set heads-up in a low stack to pot ratio situation will be among the easiest situations to navigate in poker, but every hand gets noticeably harder when the name of the player sitting opposite you is Daniel Negreanu. Besides, Vanessa managed to put a very interesting spin on this hand which merits further examination.

Preflop was a fairly standard affair. Small raise on the flop was solid especially when we consider the aspect of pot management. Turn is where the hand became really interesting. 3s was actually a very meaningful card because it significantly reduced the number of value combinations in Vanessa's perceived range, especially against an opponent bluff-catching with top pair type hand.

The masterclass in navigating various spots with the top of one's range concludes with the famous hand from The Big Game that pitted Vanessa Rousso against the unpredictable and extremely talkative Tony G. Vanessa's preflop decision once again might seem a bit strange, but it makes a lot of sense when we consider the level of aggression of her opponent. While we shouldn't be results oriented, the fact that Tony made a blind bet on the flop is a solid indicator that Rousso was onto something when choosing to play the hand passively preflop. Raising over the top of Tony's blind cbet was a perfect way to induce further bluffs and value bet in case he flopped a piece. Cbet/3bet line is remarkably hard to balance, especially for players on the aggressive side of the spectrum.

Because of that Vanessa's raise/call line was most likely the optimal play that she got rewarded for on the turn. Even when improving to a top set Rousso continued with her disciplined game plan and utilized her position to give the opponent as much rope as he needed to put his stack in with both top and bottom parts of his range.