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Annette Obrestad in profile - Poker Channel Exclusive

We’ve profiled some of the most established and accomplished players in Europe lately, but now let’s switch our attention to the new school of European poker. Perhaps there is no better place to start than the epitome of the online poker generation, Annette ‘Annette_15’ Obrestad. It came as a surprise to some when a young Norwegian girl won the inaugural World Series of Poker Europe main event the day before her 19th birthday, but for anyone who has spent enough time playing online, this was no underdog story.

Annette_15 is so called because that is how old she was when she first started playing online poker, creating a bankroll underage initially from a freeroll win on UltimateBet and famously never having made a deposit into a poker room. Between 2006 and 2007 she won close to a million dollars in multi table tournaments and she soared up the Pocketfives MTT rankings, where she held the top spot for a very long time. Then in 2007, being staked by online poker moguls JohnyBax and Sheets, she bulldozed her way to the WSOPE final table and found herself heads up with fellow internet young gun John Tabatabai. After a memorable battle she won the bracelet and a million pounds, as well as securing a sponsorship deal with Betfair.

Her victory, that day in London, will one day be remembered as one of the landmark moments in the history of poker, as many a record was broken. She became the first female main event champion in a WSOP main event, the youngest bracelet winner at 18, 2nd in the Norway all time money list, 3rd in the all time women’s rankings and the first WSOPE champion. She also was close to winning both the online and European player of the year award simultaneously. Annette followed up on her amazing result with a second place finish at EPT Dublin less than a month later for €297,000.

What makes all of this remarkable is that Annette has to wait until 2010 before she can play in the larger version of the WSOP in Vegas, when she will turn 21. This didn’t stop her flying out there this year just to hang out and play online poker with her peers.

Annette Obrestad may look harmless, but she is already one of the most feared players in the World and the number one player you do not want on your immediate left. In my opinion she uses the button better than any tournament player in the world and is ruthlessly aggressive when she has position. She proved this by famously winning a tournament without looking at her hole cards online to demonstrate the power of position.

She may not find herself at the top of the online rankings these days because she spends much more of her time travelling the globe and playing in live events and plenty of televised invitational tournaments. Vegas won’t know what has hit it in September 2010 but until then we have to play major European tournaments in fear that we’ll get drawn at Annette_15’s table.

By Barry Carter - November 19th 2008

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