Prior to poker, I was in chess. 

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Chess is one of the few family traditions we had and so I started playing at a young age. My grandfather was very active in my chess education and would anxiously await my coach's feedback on my progress and tournament results each week. I liked chess, but was generally more interested in the social aspect of it and lacked motivation to study. I was much more interested in playing basketball; additionally I was a ball-girl for the NBA Champion Houston Rockets and shooting around with household names of the NBA was a lot more fun than studying chess!

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      I spent a lot of time in summer sports camps throughout my youth and during my freshman year at UT Dallas, I decided to organize a summer chess camp for kids. Chess had been a positive part of my life and I understood the skills I'd learned had helped me in other areas, so I decided to try and create a chess camp that was fun...one that kids would love going to just as much as the basketball camps I had attended only a few years earlier. Chess camps were not a typical summer activity for kids; there were some advanced camps for competitive tournament play but no programs for beginner, scholastic players who wanted to learn the game in a fun way while extracting its cognitive benefits. That one-week camp during my freshman year turned into six weeks of chess camps the following summer, followed by twelve weeks and six cities the summer after that. USA Chess was very successful very quickly and by the time I sold the majority of my shares in the company in 2004, it had become the premier chess camp organization for children in the country holding summer chess camps in more than 100 U.S. cities.

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While in Wilmington, DE for a chess camp during that summer in 2004, a few camp instructors and I went to dinner at the hotel restaurant and I convinced them to teach me how to play poker. We moved to the lobby area afterwards, found a deck of cards and collected as many $1 bills as possible. We did not sleep that night; went directly to camp the next morning right from the lobby. I was hooked.

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     I continued my poker education by playing the local cash games in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Once I realized the difference between cash games and tournaments, I decided to focus on tournaments because I thought my chess background would be helpful. I traveled a bit throughout 2004-2005 playing various WSOP Circuit Events and tournaments at Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana and Oklahoma casinos.  I wasn't too profitable these first few years and after the 2006 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, I stopped playing poker for a while.

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     Some of 2008 and most of 2009 was spent traveling for live poker: Atlantic City, Barcelona, Foxwoods, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Monaco and Morocco. I had also started playing online poker regularly during this time and I'd noticed substantial improvement in my game. By January 2010 I was playing online tournaments full time, however on April 15, 2011 - un-fondly known as Black Friday - online poker was shut down in the US. I sold my house in Dallas and moved to Las Vegas to play live poker full time, but eventually moved to Rosarito, Mexico to get back online in 2012. I loved living in Mexico and created a thread on 2+2 that I updated with pictures and trip reports throughout my time there. I moved back to the U.S. in 2014 to my home state of New Jersey when online poker became regulated there.

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My husband, Joe Cappuccio is also a professional poker player and we have a 3.5 year old son named Luca.