There are a handful of players in the international poker community for whom a last name is all but superfluous. Competitors and commentators chat about Doyle, Gus, TJ and Stuey, for example, without ever needing to add the Brunson, Hansen, Cloutier or Ungar. And ever since since a young diminutive Norwegian woman first appeared in Casino Barcelona at the beginning of EPT season four, people similarly chat about "Annette" as though they've known her all their life.
Annette -- Obrestad, of course -- was, and remains, a sensation. Even when she was just a mystical teenager lurking behind an online moniker ("Annette_15", natch) she was the talk of the online poker community. But as soon as she began appearing in casinos and destroying the live scene too, she became a crossover celebrity in the widest sense: even real newspapers and magazines began writing about the youngest ever winner of a World Series bracelet. She was 19-years-old, a woman, and had just banked a million pounds in a single tournament win. What's not to love?
Yesterday, now aged 20 and with countless further cashes behind her, Annette was the only major name to survive from inarguably one of the toughest major tournament starting tables ever seen (that one, also featuring Jesper Hougaard, Michael Tureniec, and another couple of one-name wonders, Gus and ElkY). And today her name also stands out from the day two line-up: she is on a table surrounded by Vijayan Nagarajan, Michael Aston, Lars Kristiansen, Laurence Houghton, Matteo Fratello, Thomas Markussen, Kristian Kofoed and Orjan Skommo otherwise known as "PokerStars qualifier", "PokerStars qualifier", "PokerStars qualifier", "PokerStars player", "PokerStars qualifier", "PokerStars player", Annette, "PokerStars qualifier", "PokerStars qualifier", if you read down the "status" column on the table draw page.
Further proof of the blurred boundaries these days between online and live poker play.
