Two pairs make Jennifer Harman unique in the world of poker: 1, she is the only female player in the history of the World Series of Poker to have won a pair of bracelets in non-gender specific play (she won the 2000 $5,000 NL Deuce to Seven Draw and 2002 $5,000 Limit Hold’em tournaments) and 2, she has a pair of transplanted kidneys.
Like many other top players, Jennifer began playing cards before the legal minimum: at the age of 16, she had procured a fake ID and was frequenting her home town Reno’s many poker rooms. Though Harman had done well in private home games since she was 8 years old, the professional card room competition proved too much for her early in her career. But she stuck with it and before graduating from the University of Nevada, Harman had logged thousands of hours in live poker play. She had also received her first kidney transplant.
When Jennifer was 17, her mother died of kidney related illnesses. Jennifer is afflicted with similar problems and following her second successful kidney transplant in 2004 she created the Creating Organ Donation Awareness non-profit organization.
Harman’s first real successes at the poker table happened in LA. She began to buy into major tournaments in the mid 1990s and in 2000, five minutes before the Deuce-Seven Lowball tournament began, she received a turbo tutorial from Howard Lederer on the game which she had never in her life played – lowball. She would go on to win the tournament and more than $200,000.
Harman has victories in both WSOP play and WSOP Circuit play. She has made it to 3 different WPT tables and cashed more than 30 times in WPT and WSOP play combined, yet her focus remains on cash games: she is a regular at the infamous “Big Game” in Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio, where she plays in a $4,000/$8,000 mixed game 4 nights a week with the likes of Doyle Brunson, Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey and Antonio Esfandiari. She has also made more than $9,000,000 alone as a member of The Corporation in heads-up play with Texas billionaire Andy Beal.
Jennifer Harman was born on November 29, 1964 and lives with her husband and fellow poker pro Marco Traniello and their two twin boys. She is also very close with poker pro Daniel Negreanu.