Queen Elizabeth

With a stunning run at the Heads-Up Championship, Shannon now has to be taken seriously
BY JONATHAN GROTENSTEIN

BARRY GREENSTEIN IS BEING PUT TO THE TEST.
He takes another look at the five cards on the board: a pair of sixes and a K-Q-J combo that, when added to the A-10 in the hole, completes his ace-high straight. A strong hand. Almost certainly the best hand.
While he’s been extraordinarily lucky to get there—the original J-6-6 flop hardly promised such favorable results—Greenstein has led out with a bet at every opportunity throughout the hand. This is what professionals do. He’s playing with aggression. Creating his own luck. He has his opponent, who has responded to each swipe with a weak call, exactly where he wants her. He bets the river, hoping to keep her on the line.

The line tugs back.

His opponent responds with the first display of strength she’s shown at any point during this hand. In fact, it’s the strongest possible response: She re-raises with all of her chips, which are more than enough to cover what Greenstein has left. Call and lose, and his run at the 2007 NBC National Heads-Up Championship is over. But he’s committed way too many chips to this hand to escape now.

He makes the call. His opponent, flashing a grin toothy enough to include about an inch of gumline, turns over J-6, having flopped—and slowplayed—an absolute monster. It has taken Barry Greenstein exactly 34 minutes to make the same mistake that an ever-increasing number of other top pros have made. He has underestimated Shannon Elizabeth.

***

“I think that a lot of pros underestimate her,” said poker pro Phil Gordon. “Underestimating your opponent is a big mistake in No-Limit Hold ’Em, and people make that mistake all the time against Shannon.”
At first blush, it’s easy to see why. Most of us know (or think we know) Shannon Elizabeth through her body of work. Work that, more often than not, has involved the memorable use of her body. Her film debut—the 1996 thriller Jack Frost—would have been forgotten a long time ago had it not included a strange and altogether disturbing scene where Shannon’s character gets raped and killed by an evil snowman. (Yes, an actual snowman. With a carrot for a nose.) She’s a star, of course, because of her turn as “Nadia” in American Pie, where she donned a Czech accent (and little else) to embody, quite literally, the object of teenage lust.
Now she’s just check-raised you on the river. What are you going to think? You should probably focus on her three cashes at last year’s World Series of Poker. But you probably won’t.
***

In the beginning, she had little to qualify her as a poker player outside of her birthplace and her deep and abiding love for animals.
She was born and raised, like the game of Hold ’Em itself, in Texas. That might have offered her a head-start at the card table, had there been the time or the inclination to play cards. But there were dance lessons. The high school tennis team. Beer and boyfriends. Blessed with a lithe body and exotic good looks—to look at Elizabeth is to witness an undeniably successful intermingling of Syrian, English, French, and Cherokee ancestry—she left her home state after high school to begin a modeling career that took her around the world. Print ads paved the way for television commercials, then film.
She met a boy—fellow thespian Joe Reitman—and they fell in love. Their mutual passion for animals led them to found a charity, Animal Avengers, dedicated to rescuing and finding homes for stray pets. (The charity has survived. The relationship with Reitman has not.)
When, in 2003, the producers of a new show called Celebrity Poker Showdown called to tell her that by competing in a televised No-Limit Hold ’Em poker tournament she’d have the chance to win thousands of dollars for Animal Avengers, she figured it was worth a shot. She quickly learned the basics of the game from one of the show’s producers and sat down to play. It didn’t take long for Elizabeth to regret her decision. “I went on the show and I was horrible,” she recalled. “I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it.”

Gordon, the show’s co-host at the time, offered a similarly blunt assessment. “She didn’t know what the hell she was doing.” She lasted only six hands, surviving just slightly longer than Coolio. She left the show with a bad taste in her mouth and zero intention of ever playing poker again.
Poker, however, wasn’t quite ready to let go of her. The game’s huge and unexpected explosion in popularity, coupled with the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for more, meant that there would be many more charity tournaments in need of celebrity players. To no one’s surprise, except maybe her own, Elizabeth found herself bombarded with invitations to play and a logic that was quickly growing inescapable: More tournaments meant more opportunities to raise money for the animals. It wasn’t the pleasure of playing, but a grudging sense of duty that kept her coming back for more. At first, anyway.
***
“I don’t know anyone,” Antonio Esfandiari said recently, “who started playing poker then said, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to play anymore.’”
Somewhere along the way, Elizabeth realized that she wasn’t actually dreading her visits to the poker table. “I started understanding the psychological aspects of the game. That got me more involved.”
She began to think about the game away from the table, discussing her play with any number of poker professionals who seemed eager to offer their advice. “[Shannon] soaks up everything she hears, learning as much as possible,” said one of them, superstar Daniel Negreanu. “I think she has all the necessary traits to do well at poker.” In early-2006, she made a final table in a charity tournament at the Sundance Film Festival, eventually finishing in fifth place.
That summer, she found herself drawn to the World Series of Poker. Not just the Championship Event, which she’d played in 2005, but the entire series. She wound up entering nearly every No-Limit Hold ’Em event.
And cashed three times.
“The first time I cashed was kind of a big deal to me,” remembered Elizabeth. “I got pretty deep with some good chips. I definitely made some mistakes and I knew exactly what they were later on, so I learned from them.”
The final time was even better. “I’d gotten very, very low in chips and we were going hand-for-hand on each table.” Most of her remaining chips went toward covering the big blind, where she looked down to discover the five and the deuce of clubs. When the flop brought two more clubs, she threw in the rest of her chips, praying for a flush. The player on the button quickly called.
She wound up making her flush on the turn, but faced the possibility that a fourth club on the river would give her opponent, who held the eight of clubs, a bigger flush. Which is exactly what happened when the dealer turned over the last card: the three of clubs.
Elizabeth’s disappointment lasted only the few seconds it took her to realize that the card had given her a straight flush. “That might have been a highlight,” she coyly admitted.
***

Still, you would have had a hard time finding anyone who believed that her invitation to the 2007 NBC Heads-Up Championship represented anything but the chance for the TV network to add a pretty face to the lineup. Until Elizabeth starting dismantling the lineup with brutal and ruthless efficiency.
“I’ve had a lot of coaches along the way that have just kind of helped me here and there, depending on what my questions were, what I was playing,” she said. “When I did my heads-up tournament, a few different pros came over to my house and helped me: Joe Cassidy, Jeff Madsen, Clonie Gowen. Everybody’s been really great.”
Even without the lessons, she probably would have done all right against her first opponent, Rene Angelil, who decided an all-in bluff would scare Elizabeth, dressed in pink with hair in pigtails, into folding her hand. She stood her ground with top pair, sent Angelil packing, and moved on to face one of her tutors, Madsen. Her hot run of cards, coupled with what were obviously effective lessons, gave Elizabeth everything she needed to move onto the third round, where she faced Greenstein in the hand described earlier.
“She benefited from really good cards early on,” claimed poker author Michael Craig, who observed her play throughout the tournament. “But you still have to get paid off. It’s easy to be a good player when you flop a full house, but for someone who is not experienced playing for money and recognition, to take the right amount of time, to control her breathing … She used her skills as a polished performer to her benefit.”
Pitted against Humberto Brenes in the quarterfinals, Elizabeth discovered that the script had been re-written—it was Brenes who was catching all the right cards, at least early on.

“I was card-dead,” she recalled, “and he was hitting two-pair almost every hand we played. I was stunned.” Rather than wilt under the pressure, however, Elizabeth decided to change her approach. “I knew I had to beat him pre-flop instead of seeing the flops against him. So I started raising a ton of hands and getting him off his hands before the flop.”

“She acted like she had better cards than Humberto,” said Craig, “and took advantage of him. She repeatedly bluffed him into folding.”

“I think that a lot of guys don’t think girls can bluff,” observed Elizabeth. “So I tend to do that.”
Brenes joined the rest of his fellow professionals on the sidelines, and Elizabeth went on to play Paul Wasicka in the semifinals. She had a chance to beat him, holding Ac-Qc and a chip edge during an all-in race against Wasicka’s pocket tens. She paired her queen on the flop, but Wasicka filled out a straight on the river. It turned out to be the beginning of the end of her magical run, as Wasicka—who would go on to win the championship—spent the next half-hour separating Elizabeth from her stack.

Despite the ending, it was hard for her to be disappointed in the bottom line: a third-place finish against a murderous lineup, good for a $125,000 prize. Maybe more importantly, the poker world had been served notice. Shannon Elizabeth can play poker.

***
Asked if she could see herself as a poker player over an actress, she paused before answering. “Um, yeah, in a sense,” she said, then quickly adding, “but there’s no need to pick one over the other.
“With acting, you have so much downtime anyway. Poker is a good way to occupy my time, make some extra money, keep my brain sharp. And I really love doing it. So hopefully I’ll just keep getting better and better and just keep going.”
Elizabeth, a strong believer in a balanced life, often meditates before matches, burning sage and incense to clear her mind. “I understand that it’s corny, and I understand it is what it is,” she admitted. “I try not to believe that that’s going to make a difference. “But on the off-chance that it does,” she added, laughing, “I just keep with it.”

Will a Hollywood starlet with quirky rituals and a big smile continue to succeed against the best in the world? “I’m trying to get over my fear of going out of tournaments or making mistakes,” she said. “Somebody taught me that when you’re playing a tournament, it’s not just about making the money, it’s about winning. To do that, you have to accumulate chips. “In the beginning, I played so tight. In the beginning, it was just a last-longer for me. And then I started realizing that that wasn’t good enough, just making the money wasn’t good enough. I’ve been working on that a lot.”

And you can add a chip on her shoulder to the ones in front of her. “I think people are pretty much gunning for me,” she laughed. “For multiple reasons.”

Jonathan Grotenstein is a writer living in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of All In: The (Almost) Entirely True History Of The World Series Of Poker, and has collaborated on books with Phil Gordon and Scott Fischman.