Liv Boeree
A poker champion with a background in astrophysics, Liv empowers and educates audiences through her deep love for science, game theory and counter-intuitive thought experiments.
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Liv Boeree's 2025 biography
Meet Liv Boeree
Growing up in rural Kent, England, Liv was a highly competitive straight-A student who held a deep love for space and astronomy from an early age. This lead to her studying physics and astrophysics at the University of Manchester, graduating in 2005 with first class honours (4.0 GPA equivalent).
She was also a passionate guitar player, spending much of her time between lectures playing lead for various metal bands, a passion that lead her to London after graduation to pursue music further. It was there she noticed a cryptic TV gameshow advert looking for contestants “willing to use their powers of skill and deception to win money”, to which she promptly applied with the hope it could pay off her student debt. After being selected as one of the five contestants, it was revealed that they were to be taught to play poker.
Despite not winning that particular show, Liv immediately fell in love with the game and decided to pursue the game as both a player and TV host. Her first major win was the televised European Ladies Championship in 2007, but her breakthrough moment came a few years later when she bested 1240 opponents to take down the European Poker Tour in Italy.
Her poker career continued for another nine years as a member of Team Pokerstars Pro, hosting various TV shows and winning further live and online tournaments including the 2017 World Series of Poker Tag-Team championship alongside her partner Igor Kurganov.
Liv retired from professional poker soon after her breakout TED talk to pursue speaking and TV more actively, and today splits her time between the speaking circuit and creating TV and video content on her favourite counter-intuitive and scientific topics.
Liv Boeree's 2025 talks & topics
Applying Poker Strategies to Business & Life
Like poker, life is a game of high-stakes decisions under uncertainty. Liv explores the thinking techniques of top poker players, including cognitive bias reduction, emotional control and the role of intuition in decision-making.
Introduction to Statistics, Game Theory and Forecasting
We live in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, so how do we keep our sense-making capabilities in top shape? Drawing from her background in science, poker and applied rationality, Liv explains how to upgrade your prediction skills with techniques such as expected value thinking and Bayes Rule.
Artificial Intelligence & Games
Artificial Intelligence is poised to be the most impactful technological breakthrough of the 21st century, and games are a great way of measuring its progress. In just a few decades, algorithms have advanced from rudimentary tic-tac-toe solvers of the 1950s to powerful AI defeating world champions in notoriously complex games. Liv explores what sets these technologies apart from the human mind, and what their implications are for our future.
Effective Philanthropy
Philanthropy is undergoing a scientific revolution. Previously, charity and the act of “doing good” was a fuzzy, unmeasurable concept that most people felt couldn’t — or maybe even shouldn’t — be evaluated or compared. But nowadays, improved data and evidence allows us to better measure the impact of our philanthropic actions. In this illuminating talk, Liv discusses how, and why, we should prioritize between cause areas, and how we can maximize the positive impact we want to achieve on the world.
Counter-Intuitive Phenomena
How far does the Earth stretch if you cut it into one metre cubes and lay them out in one long line? When is a positive medical test result still more likely to be false than it is to be true? And which likelihoods are closer together: 50% and 1%, or 1% and 0%? Prepare to have your mind blown as Liv explores fascinating counterintuitive concepts that defy our deepest instincts.
A Woman in a Man’s World
As a female professional poker player, heavy metal enthusiast and physics graduate, Liv is very accustomed to being the only girl in the room. Liv discusses the pros and cons of being a woman in a male-dominated industry.