Lisa Dergan

A Revealing Look At The Queen Of Poker Royale

By Matthew Armstrong

THE NEW SIDELINE REPORTER for GSN’s Poker Royale series is not just “another pretty face.” For starters, “pretty” isn’t the correct adjective, “another” seems ordinary, and, well, “face” is a little too narrow for Playboy’s Miss July 1998. But Lisa Dergan is also a seasoned broadcast sports journalist who primarily covered football and golf for a nationwide audience before delving into poker.

The golf game she honed as a child was the key to kickstarting her broadcast career. While playing in golf tournaments, Dergan met producers from the television station KCBS in Los Angeles and joined the broadcast team for the live telecasts of the entire 2001 NFL season. She has since been a sportscaster with Fox Sports Net, interviewing such notable athletes as Charles Barkley, Tiger Woods, and John Elway, and is a correspondent for Best Damn Sports Show, Period. The magazine Stuff recently bestowed her with the honor of “sexiest sportscaster.”

For all of her sports broadcasting gigs, Dergan was able to draw on her experience as either a player or an avid fan. This was not the case with poker, which she admits presented new challenges.

“It was like anything, you just have to immerse yourself completely in the subject until you learn it,” said Dergan. “With poker, the most difficult thing was just trying to learn the lingo. It has a language all its own.” Dergan is playing some poker now, mostly with friends and neighbors, and says she’s caught a bit of the poker bug. So who knows? Maybe down the road she’ll be playing in the high-stakes games instead of reporting on them. Certainly, the pros would welcome the chance to gaze across the felt at her under the guise of trying to discern her tells. With Dergan at the table, just about every guy in the room would develop a Howard Lederer stare in a hurry.