Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Kathy Liebert spent most of her life on Long Island in New York, New York. When it came time to make a college choice, Kathy decided on Marist College and was able to graduate with a degree in Business and Finance from there. With her degree in hand, Liebert was fortunate enough to land a nice job with Dun & Bradstreet analyzing stocks.
But landing the job was the only real fortunate part of the deal as Kathy began to realize pretty quickly that her lifelong passion didn’t lie in analyzing stocks. So she left Dun & Bradstreet armed with a nice chunk of change that she had made playing the stock market while at the company. This money enabled her to fulfill a desire to do some skiing in Colorado. But the ski slopes weren’t the only thing that Kathy Liebert discovered out West.
Kathy had played some poker growing up with her family in New York but in Colorado she began visiting Central City to do a little gaming and it didn’t take long before she discovered that she had a talent for poker and took a job as a prop player at a local casino. This became somewhat of a paid internship as she not only received money for starting up poker games but also learned valuable playing skills on top of everything else.
She learned so much that her game was eventually good enough to handle the competition in Las Vegas, and she immediately began tearing up the smaller Vegas poker tourneys with plenty of top 10 finishes. Her first big break would come in 1997 when she finished 2nd in a WSOP No-Limit Hold’em tournament and cashed for over $120K.
But what Kathy Liebert will always be remembered for by many came in the 2002 Party Poker Million tournament. This would be the first Limit Hold’em event to ever offer a $1 million top prize and many of the best players in the world came to claim it. When the smoke cleared though, it was amateur Beri Kacherian and Kathy playing for the million. Liebert would go on to beat Kacherian and, in the process, become the first female player ever to win $1 million in a poker tournament.
After winning the Party Poker Million, Liebert would achieve another personal milestone in 2004 when she captured her first WSOP gold bracelet in a $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em Shootout tournament. She hasn’t been able to win any more WSOP events since then but she has made numerous huge cashes in World Poker Tour tournaments in the aftermath.
Aside from her talent in poker, one other really interesting thing about Kathy Liebert is that she’s not really a gambler at heart like many other professional players. Instead she likes investing her winnings into the stock market, and she’s got a lot of winnings to invest as the all-time leader among women in lifetime tourney cashes with $4.5 million. That total should only go up in the future.
