Random Questions with WPT Ladies Champion - JJ Liu
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006August 31st 2006, JJ Liu not only wins her first WPT title, but also the 2006 WPT Ladies Championship. In the end against Kelli Griggs, she makes an amazing call to win with a small pair, and what followed was a moment most will remember as the QUEEN SCREAM.
JJ was born in Taiwan and came to the United States in 1985 to earn a Master’s degree in computer engineering. She worked in Silicon Valley until 2004.
While working as a computer engineer, she honed her poker skills playing limit holdem at the Bay 101 Casino. Her attention shifted to No Limit Holdem due to the rising popularity of televised poker tournaments.
She is happily married to professional poker player Dan Alspach and they split their time between Palo Alto and Las Vegas when not traveling to poker tournaments.
Her many accomplishments include the WPT Ladies Championship, $900,000+ in tournament earnings over the last 10 years (ranking her 9th overall amongst women), 10 cashes in the World Series of Poker, and 4 cashes at open events on the World Poker Tour. The most recent being a 14th place finish in event #9 at the Bellagio Five Diamond Classic.
With the recent expansion of televised poker into the East and Southeast Asian markets, and new mega-resorts like the Macau where the WPT will be holding events come 2007, JJ hopes to become the ambassador of poker to the Chinese speaking world.
And it seems that the “Grammie” character might have some competition.
JJ’s mother is 80 years old and is quite the poker player. In her first 2 live poker tournaments, she cashed. Can you guess which poker tournament they were in? The World Series of Poker!!
Needless to say after spending some time and getting to know JJ a bit, we have come to the conclusion that she is one COOL lady.
Check out what she had to say when faced with Life’s A Bluff - Random Questions.
ALSO, later this week we will be posting our interview with Gavin Smith. You don’t want to miss it!
- Frank Frisina
