STATELINE, Nev. – In the poker world, dominated by 95% men, Lexy Gavin-Mather is many things – a coach, an author, a vlogger, and a professional poker player who travels the world and has amassed over $2 million in combined winnings from both tournaments and cash games. To think she almost became a lawyer instead is mystifying.
When Gavin-Mather was in college, she had plans to pursue law school. As fate would have it, she took an interest in online poker.
“It was my junior year in college,” recalled Gavin-Mather. “I started to have success early online. Once I graduated from college, I was at this crossroads: ‘Do I go the law school route and have a very respectable, but conventional life or do I see where poker can take me?'”
Gavin-Mather took the road less traveled, continuing online poker with high hopes of having lasting success.
“Poker is very much a game of skill, but of course there’s an element of luck,” said Gavin-Mather as she touched on the success in her early career being both a good and bad thing. Riding the high of a winning streak is great until poker variance knocks you off the summit.
“Poker is a volume game and you have ups and downs,” said Gavin-Mather. “It quickly turned. I realized it is not that easy, and I really need to study this game and become a little more disciplined with my bank roll management.”
Gavin-Mather hit the books and studied hard, building skill and balancing luck to become a powerhouse in the sport. Fast forward more than a decade, and she’s now sponsored by the World Series of Poker (WSOP), competing in WSOP tournaments all over the world including Prague, the Bahamas, and Cypress, all while documenting her life as the most subscribed female poker player on YouTube.
“I think one of the big reasons for my growth is I do daily vlogs at the most watched poker times of the year,” said Gavin-Mather who creates videos every day for seven weeks during the WSOP. “That quickly catapulted me from zero subscribers to 10,000 subscribers in maybe two months.”
Gavin-Mather’s business mindset took her poker wins at the table and turned them into a life built around professional poker, showing others what it’s like to go all-in on a sport made up of 95% men.
Before she was known among the ranks in poker, she was sometimes underestimated.
“Men have the tendency to think that women are not good at poker. They think that when we bet, we always have the best hand. They don’t think we’re capable of bluffing, so they will try to be more aggressive towards us at the table,” said Gavin-Mather. “They’ll try to put more pressure on us with bets and raises, so that was very much my experience back before I was known, which actually can be an advantage because if they underestimate us, we can come up with strategies to combat that.”
In her experience, you have to have tough skin to participate in a poker room, and an even tougher skin if you’re going to have a YouTube channel on top of it. “I’ve been voted out of games because I was winning in them and they didn’t like that a woman was beating them,” she said as she recalled being called names and even having cards thrown at her on some occasions. “I would say 97% of men are very respectful,” she added. “But you’re going to have that small percent of jealous people.”
Gavin-Mather’s advice for women looking to get into poker: “For the women reading – don’t be afraid to step into a poker room. At the end of the day, everyone gets the same two cards, and if you want to take it professionally, make sure to study the game, stay on top of strategies because poker does get tougher and tougher,” she said. “Stay on top of your game, have thick skin, and also don’t be afraid to try. I think that’s a big road block that a lot of women face. They’re intimidated by the poker room atmosphere, and I promise you, once you sit down at the table, all of that fear will go away.”
Now that Gavin-Mather is known in the industry, she finds that some opponents assume they know how she plays and will try to either use her strategies against her or they want to play against her because “it’s cool to play against a pro.” Either way she’s always distinguishing how her opponents perceive her and the strategies she can use to adjust to that perception.
As the author of “Mastering Small Stakes No-Limit Tournaments”, a book about strategies to beat small stakes poker tournaments, Gavin-Mather noted that those looking to dip their toes into poker will find the book helpful as it starts off with some basics and goes into more advanced concepts.
Among her career highlights, Gavin-Mather won $70,000 live cash with a $26,000 buy-in at the WSOP Paradise Super Main Event in 2025, marking a career best thus far. In addition, she won third place in the World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic for a $40,058 cash, 10th place at Bay 101 Shooting Star with a $5200 buy-in and a $41,060 cash. She won two RunGood Poker Series rings at All-Stars and Checkpoint San Diego, and was nominated for Global Poker Index’s Rising Star in content creation in 2022. Most recently, she was in Lake Tahoe for the WSOP Circuit where she played five tournaments and made three final tables.
“I jump on the opportunity to come play in Lake Tahoe, it’s my happy place. It’s so beautiful and serene. It’s really nice to play poker in such a magical atmosphere because poker can be very stressful,” she said. “It’s hard to be stressed when you walk outside and see such an amazing lake.”
Although Gavin-Mather continues to break barriers in the poker industry, she’s got her sights set on a few other goal posts. One is winning the WSOP Main Event which happens in July and is a $10,000 buy-in. First place winners can receive between $8 million to $12 million along with the most-coveted prize in poker, the WSOP bracelet.
The other is to win Top Female Player of the Year for a second time. She already won in 2020, but because it was the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gavin-Mather wasn’t able to attend an award ceremony. “If I were to pursue another crazy goal, it would be to be Female Player of the Year again and get my award.”
Through it all, Gavin-Mather remains appreciative for the opportunities she’s been given and the guts it took to take risks.
“I’m grateful for the career that I’ve had, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.”
To learn more about Lexy Gavin-Mather, visit lexygavinmather.com. Her weekly newsletter can be accessed by going to https://poker-digest.lexygavinmather.com/.
You can find Lexy Gavin-Mather on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@LexyGavinPoker.
