Alisa, the Omaha Fox ♠️


Hello, I am Alisa, Russian, 29 years old. 

Dad taught me every card game he knew when’s  I was 6. We played for interest: if I lost I did push-ups, if I won he’d give me extra pocket money. Pain is still my best motivator, I still fail to beat my dad and I don’t mind both. 

I discovered 5-card draw poker and Stud when I was around 10, cruising the computer games in my Pentium-something. Few years later the little cousin showed me Texas Holdem. 

At the university I accidentally started playing online after discovering the free 50$ offer. A year later my bankroll had a Black Friday so I graduated, worked as a sport journalist and shortly went traveling with an online job. I would still play online poker every now and then, accidentally registering in the PLO tournament and instantly falling in love with the Great Game. 

Almost 7 years of traveling around the world on a reckless, to state the least, bankroll management, entirely dependent on my full-time job, I was never brave enough or even in a right place mentally to give poker a good go. 

Using every opportunity to organize a game or visit a casino, I would - up to this day - teach heaps of people from scratch just to have someone to play with. 

I didn’t quite feel the online poker and didn’t quite realize that. Someone had told me I should be playing live and it took me a year to hear these words. 

A random acquaintance with a Russian gambler saw me back in the live NLH action and after two sessions of feeling hopeless at the home games (I’d switched to PLO a couple of years earlier) I started to suspect that I might still have it. 

I decided to finally give it a go. Never looking for an easy life, I chose the exact moment when I have a solid base in Indonesia, where any gambling is banned.

I committed to traveling to Manila or Macau for a few days every month or so to figure it out. 

This blog was created mostly for myself as a part of figuring it out and putting it all together. I will be delighted if my thoughts are legit and serve for somebody else who decides to take on the Asian live poker action. 

Expect poker-to-the-point content. Am I neither an entertainer nor a GTO geek, mumbling over the solvers. 

My poker philosophy can be best described as “Keeping it simple simply works”. I think I should keep it even more simple to make it work for me once and for all.

I am a Fox because in Russian “fox” is lisa,  which is almost my name and used to be my childhood nickname. 

So, let’s let the Fox out!