Iranian Beauty Queen Aims to Find a Place among the Top Ranking Female Poker Players

When you look around a poker tournament, you soon realize that the majority of the players are men. In reality, women playing poker is something more and more common these days. Melika Razavi is a highly ambitious young lady aiming to be one of the top ranking female poker players.

Gambling, poker, magic and beauty pageants are banned in Iran. Well, it really looks like someone pushed ranking her boundaries pretty hard. Iranian Melika Razavi became a poker-playing magician who also participated in several beauty contests. Her most recent appearance was in Monte Carlo, at the €5,300 EPT Main Event.

Iranian-born Melika Razavi fell in love with poker at first glance. Back then, at the age of 9, she saw Canadian family friends playing poker during their visit to Iran. Now calls Cape Town as her home, Razavi moved there at the age of 15 with her mother.

A true passion for cards is what keeps Razavi going

At 16, she was already playing home games with her friends in South Africa. In the meantime, the youngster realized that she is very much into magic. After seeing a show, Melika decided to learn how to do magic tricks.  Yet, her flame for poker was stronger than ever. Later, at the age of 23, she had private sponsors already. That was the moment when she started to travel and play high-stakes cash games. After some time, Razavi started playing tournaments.

Razavi considers herself a magician and motivational speaker. Moreover, she is a professional poker player, having played poker all around the world. She competed in Miss Global beauty pageant, representing Iran. The beauty queen now lives in Cape Town and was scared to go back to her country after the contest.

Razavi has the mindset of a winner

Melika was even chosen as Miss Power Woman in 2017. She has a dream to empower women and be a role model, with the message that everything is possible. She is not really competing with anyone, just wants to be the best she can. who does not just want to participate but win you have to have the mindset of a winner regardless of your gender.Coming from a culture which suppresses women, Melika is truly proud of her achievements. She thought herself magic, and she is pretty successful in winnings. In 2018 she achieved her best live cash recorded, over $56,000. Also, she appears #20 on the all-time Iranian poker money list. That is quite an illustrious position, especially considering her age. One thing we can take for granted, that Razavi will climb that ladder.

Razavi was recently playing at EPT

Admits, that being a female poker player has advantages and disadvantages as well. Surely, she worked very hard to get where she is today. She studied hard, and obviously, lost a lot of money at the beginning of her career. The game of math and knowledge does not make a difference between players. Melika is encouraging everyone to play, regardless of sex and nationality. Besides, Razavi is helping in other ways as well. The player has always given a percentage of her poker winnings to different charities.

Melika recently participated at The European Poker Tour (EPT). This year’s tournament was organized between April 25-May 4, 2019 at the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco. The upcoming  EPT tournaments this year:

• Open Madrid: June 22-30
• Barcelona: Augustus 20- September 1
• Open Sochi: October 4-13

On the way to find a place among the top ranking female poker players

No doubt, the vast proportion of poker players are men. Yet, there are some super talented female contestants around the tables. Men still dominate the field. However, there are several acknowledged female players. Let’s see some of them.

#1 Vanessa Selbst – $11.85 million

Vannessa is that aggressive player who is pretty hard to top. The now retired player was active for over 12 years. She can easily be called the best player ever. The only woman to have won three WSOP bracelets, also had eight final tables, 20 money finishes, and two WPT final tables.

#2 Kathy Liebert – $6.23 million

The American poker player made history several times during her career over two decades. Liebert was probably the first woman who actually traveled to play on big buy-in events regularly.  Originally from Nashville, the player now resides in Las Vegas.

#3 Annette Obrestad – $3.94 million

The Norwegian prodigy started her online poker career at the age of 15. She has proved her worth around the table several times. In 2007 she edged the record for a single-event payout to a female player, winning over $2.00 million.

#4 Liv Boeree

On 21 April 2010, Boeree won the European Poker Tour main event in Sanremo, at the time the largest ever poker tournament in Europe.

Moreover, she became the third woman ever to win an EPT title. In 2014, Boeree co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, an organization that promotes giving to charity. In fact, they managed to raise over $6,000,000 for supported charities.