Sometimes, in poker, you play brilliantly and still don’t win. Your strategy is sound, your reads are right on the money, and your decision-making process is close to perfect, and yet … you still bust out, short of the money. That’s happened to Vanessa Rousso before. And it just happened again. But this one was a little different. This freezeout lasted 98 days, and was played out on major network television in front of millions of viewers. Oh, and it wasn’t poker. It was reality TV.
Yes, there’s a stone-cold bubble on Big Brother, too.
Rousso was the closest thing there was to a “celebrity” contestant on the 17th edition of the cult-fave CBS reality show. She first rocketed into the poker spotlight in 2006, winning a $5K event at Borgata for almost $300,000 and adding another $263,000 for a seventh-place finish at the WPT World Championship at Bellagio. Even though she bubbled the TV final table, she attracted enough attention to lay the groundwork for a sponsorship deal with PokerStars. Since that hot start, she’s managed to bank about $3 million more, establishing herself as one of the best female tournament poker players ever.
But overachieving is nothing new to Vanessa. In high school she excelled at sports as well as being part of the national debate team. Rousso took it to the next level in college, setting a Duke University record by earning her economics degree in just 2½ years. In 2004, she won a prestigious scholarship to law school at the University of Miami. But along the way, Rousso, who had a passion for games of strategy and studied a fair amount of game theory at Duke, found her way into poker. Her success in No-Limit Hold ’Em—along with a competitive spirit that few jobs could satiate—derailed her law career.
Rousso’s rise to stardom in the poker world was as much due to her life off the felt as on it. In 2008, she got engaged to Chad Brown, another PokerStars pro and one of the most well-liked players in the game. In early 2009, it was announced that Rousso would be appearing in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Shortly after that, she was signed, along with race car driver Danica Patrick, to represent the website GoDaddy. Vanessa and Chad were married in 2009. It was all pretty fast and pretty public.
But unlike on Big Brother, we don’t get to see what goes on in someone’s life 24/7, and in the case of Brown and Rousso, there were private struggles. In 2012, the couple separated.
No reasons were given publicly, but it was a difficult time for Vanessa, for many reasons that had nothing to do with Chad. “Our marriage failed, but we were always the best of friends,” she explained to ALL IN. “Sexuality is a complex thing. I’m not only attracted to men, or only attracted to women. I believe love is love, and that’s what matters. But after Chad, I only dated women.”
To her credit, Rousso stood by Brown’s side as he battled cancer (he died in 2014), even after their marriage had ended. With her often in the hospital was an attractive brunette from Quebec by the name of Melissa Ouellet.
Vanessa was in Montreal in 2013, playing a WPT event. She was also dabbling in the online dating world, and had arranged a blind date with Melissa. “It was love at first sight, for real,” said Vanessa. “We weren’t apart a single day up to Big Brother.” And then they were apart for 98 days with absolutely no contact. That’s an acid test for any relationship.
Rousso isn’t the first poker player to join a reality TV cast (see below). Although she won’t elaborate on the process, Vanessa has been in the casting pool for CBS since 2009 as well. “I’ve always been a huge fan of reality TV, and I’ve had a relationship with CBS for several years. It was just a matter of finding the right show.”
And that’s where Big Brother, Season 17 came into the picture. For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s a program where a group of complete strangers are locked in a house with no contact with the outside world (no TV, phones, or computers) for an extended period of time. The house is specially constructed with cameras everywhere. The houseguests play through a series of competitions giving them various powers, and each week one guest is evicted from the house until there is only one remaining. It was announced in late spring of 2015 that Vanessa Rousso would be among the houseguests for BB17.
If you know Vanessa at all, you know that there would be no way that she would jump into this game without analyzing the hell out of it. She watched the previous seven seasons of the show in their entirety. One of the things she thought over carefully was what skill sets she could bring from her poker experience to the game. But one of the things that she decided she couldn’t have in the Big Brother house was a poker face. “I decided that the best strategy was the opposite of the poker face. Conversation is a weapon in the game, and being authentic, being real, was really important to get people to trust you. And, on top of that, I was really taking a huge risk by coming out publicly on the show.”
Being open about her sexuality humanized the almost robotically intelligent Rousso, and made the game a little easier for her to play. Meanwhile, many of her poker skills did play significantly in the game, and Vanessa is quick to credit the poker experience. “I think the biggest thing was mental stamina. In poker, you have to turn on your brain for long hours. You pretty much have to turn on your brain 24/7. Also, my ability to read people for lying was pretty strong. My reads were about 90 percent right during the show.”
"My ability to read people for lying was pretty strong. My reads were about 90 percent right during the show."
But it takes more than good reads and focus to overcome all the challenges of Big Brother. “The game strips you of everything, your creature comforts, your support system. All you have is the game, and you think about it non-stop. It gets so bad. Hearing people whisper tests your sanity in that house.”
One of the things that Rousso became known for during this season of Big Brother was her tears, which (although we only see what editors want us to see) were often on display. Some people thought it might have been strategy on her part, but she insists it was all real. “In poker, the best players conceal their personality in favor of their poker face. They give away nothing. But in BB, in my opinion, you’re incentivized to be real and to display your personality. Ultimately, that helps you create deeper bonds—which translates into deeper trust—with the other players.”
But the trait that may have served her the best was her expertise in game theory. Rousso was clearly thinking about the game on a whole different level from some of the players, who appeared to be there primarily to work on their tans. It seemed at many times that Vanessa was two, three, or 12 steps ahead of the competition. And she worked every angle. “You could make plans. You could appeal to people’s logical side. You could appeal to their emotional side. Or you could make them a deal that made sense to them,” she explained. Reality TV has come a long way from the first season of Survivor, where most of the contestants played like they were on a family camping trip, with the exception of winner Richard Hatch, who played it like a game. Now, reality show contestants hit the ground running and scheming, and every player is thinking strategically. But not very many could work through the game with the clarity and long-range tactics that Vanessa used so well.
The first hurdle that Rousso had to clear came from a very real threat from another houseguest. Rousso had passed herself off as a DJ rather than a winning poker pro, since having millions in winnings would probably make her an easy target for eviction. So it was potentially troublesome when one of the other contestants, Da’Vonne Rogers, turned out to be … a poker dealer. “That could have been tricky. But I had a strategy for the first couple of weeks never to wear my baseball cap in the hopes that no one would recognize me.” Straying from her trademark look at the poker table worked. The poker dealer was evicted without ever recognizing one of the most successful players of the past decade.
One threat was gone, but a much scarier one emerged mid-season, when Vanessa was targeted by the entire house—mostly for being so smart and dangerous. Again, her poker skill came into play when she refused to go on tilt upon finding out. “The first 24 hours were rough. And then I just thought, I have a chip and a chair. I’m not done. And I got to work, thought it through, and came up with a plan. I knew I needed five votes to stay. So I used some incentive to turn it around, and showed people how keeping me made sense.”
The social media world following Big Brother thought that Vanessa’s head was locked firmly onto the chopping block and there was no escape. They were wrong. A chip and a chair turned into a pile of chips and a lot of empty chairs that were formerly occupied by other houseguests.
Ninety-eight days passed, and Rousso made it to the last episode. She found herself up against a twin named Liz Nolan and a nerdy superfan of the show named Steve Moses. Moses got to choose which player he took to the final vote, and it was one decision that Vanessa couldn’t massage. Steve knew that Vanessa had played brilliantly and would be very difficult to beat in the final vote. So he chose to evict her, and he went on to win the title. It was a brutal money bubble. First place took home $500,000. Second place took home $50,000. Rousso came in third and took home no money.
“It was a grind. People don’t understand how hard it is to compete on that show,” she reflected. “They strip you of everything, and all you can do is think about the game for 98 days. But I was blessed with the opportunity, and I enjoyed it.”
“They strip you of everything, and all you can do is think about the game for 98 days."
After being shut off from all outside sources for the entire summer, Vanessa emerged from the Big Brother house to a spectacular consolation prize: Her girlfriend Mel proposed to her at the wrap party. “The crazy part was that gay marriage was legalized while I was in the house. I had no idea! So it was even more wonderful.”
When asked what she missed most while being locked inside the fake house of Big Brother, Vanessa’s answer is an interesting one: “I missed privacy. Privacy is underrated.”
It’s one of the weird dualities of being Vanessa Rousso. She sought out the most public eye on television, the 24/7 exam room that is Big Brother, and in doing so discovered her love of privacy. So, it would make sense that there won’t be any more television in her immediate future, wouldn’t it? Wrong. She says there’s a good chance we see her in something very soon, and she will jump at the right offer. “I’m blessed for whatever opportunities might come my way, so we will see how this develops.”
In the meantime, she will continue to do her own thing. When we talked to her for this interview, she was only a few days out of the Big Brother house. She was exhausted. But not from the Big Brother. No, from an all-night poker session. She still loves the game. But she has an expanded repertoire these days, with Mel at her side. “I’m focused on music and doing my DJ thing right now. Mel and I are doing some music together under the name ‘Girl On Girl.’ But I’ll always play poker, so you can count on seeing me at the tables.”
Whatever the game, you can be sure of one thing: Vanessa Rousso will give you her best. And whatever the game, her best has proven to be pretty damned good.
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