Last week the young, beautiful and extremely talented Liv Boeree won the $30,000 Ladbrokes Poker European Ladies Championship.

This brought her into the limelight with a spate of interviews, comments and increased traffic at her web site and that of her sponsors Absolute Poker.

The great thing about this win was that Liv did not have to pay the $2,000 buy-in. She got entry through a free roll at Absolutepoker.com. With so much talent being thrown up through online poker we are definitely going to see more of that in the future.

Liv’s win has rekindled the debate on the “Women Only” tournaments. Lucy Sergides of Ladbrokes Poker firmly backs such events. The objective of such tournaments is to bring more women into live games and to give them a degree of comfort level before they step into mixed tournaments. Women only tournaments, according to Lucy, are not an indication of women’s inferiority in the game of poker. Though Liv won this ladies tournament, she does not agree with Lucy. She believes that women only tournaments in principle imply that women are either less capable poker players than men or they get intimidated by men on the poker table. Given a choice between a ladies tournament and a mixed tournament Liv would go for the latter. Liv however accepts that ladies tournaments have promotional value because they generate interest among the viewers and spectators. And she is quick to add that if she thinks she will cash then she will have no qualms in participating in ladies tournaments.

Liv Boeree was born in 1984 and brought up in Kent. She was always a sports loving person and her first tryst with gambling came as a model for Online Gambling Magazine. In 2005 she graduated from the University of Manchester with a first-class degree in astrophysics. In the same year she was chosen as one of the five “Poker Virgins” on Channel 5's “Ultimate Poker Showdown”. In this reality show people who have never played are tutored live on television. Liv was trained by Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth. Called “The Professor” because of her astrophysics degree, she became the heart and soul of the show. Liv was as good a student of poker as she was of physics. Two weeks after her initial foray into poker she beat 120 players and won the Gutshot Club tourney in London. Since then Liv has had many tournament successes including the $19,000 WPT win in December 2007. Liv not only plays poker, but she also presents live poker on television. She began with Gutshot TV in their coverage of WSOP 2006 in Vegas. Since then she has covered the EPT Season 3 for Challenge TV.

In a recent interview, Liv revealed the mantra of her success. “Play aggressively early on and build a chip lead”. Now it remains to be seen if this mantra will help her in her immediate goal. Liv has been training for the coming WSOP under her first mentor, Annie Duke, and she hopes to end up with a bracelet, or maybe two.