In early April 2007 Anna Wroblewski was 21, broke by the standards of a Las Vegas poker player, and working a $10-an-hour job. She took her first paycheck to a poker room, won a $300 satellite, and used the seat to play a $2,000 No-Limit Hold’em event at the Five Star World Poker Classic, a World Poker Tour stop. She finished 16th for $7,290. With that money she entered the $3,000 No-Limit Hold’em event of the same series, and on April 17, 2007, she won it for $337,395.
If you have ever played a satellite, you know how rarely the ladder works like that. Most players who win a seat bust the target event without a cash, and the ones who do cash usually stop there. Wroblewski climbed three rungs in a row: a $300 seat, a $2,000 cash, a $3,000 title.
Two days later she cashed again, for $18,668 in the ladies event of a WSOP Circuit stop at Caesars Palace. In less than fifteen days, Card Player calculated, a $300 satellite had turned into more than $409,000.
Born in Vietnam, made in Las Vegas
Wroblewski was born in Vietnam around 1985 and emigrated to the United States, where she plays as an American. Beyond that, the public record of her early years is thin: when she came to America and how she first learned the game are not documented in any source that can be checked. What is documented is the name she built. She has played under the nickname “the Poker Pixie”, and online as “vietcutie”, a handle that points straight back to the country of her birth. Card Player later gave her a blog under the Poker Pixie title.
She belongs to a line of Vietnamese-born players who made their careers in Las Vegas card rooms. The most famous is Scotty Nguyen, the 1998 World Series of Poker Main Event champion. Wroblewski came a generation later, into a game reshaped by televised tournaments, where a young player could go from a satellite to a final table in one spring.
The summer of 2007
The April win put her on the radar, and she kept going. At the $25,000 WPT Championship that spring she cashed in 70th place for $46,410, playing against the full WPT professional field at a $25,000 buy-in.
Then came the World Series. Event #47, a $2,000 No-Limit Hold’em tournament, drew 2,038 entries and ran from June 29 to July 1, 2007. Wroblewski reached the final table and finished fourth for $192,876. WSOP.com noted at the time that she was the sixth woman that summer to make a final table in an open event. Blair Rodman of Las Vegas won the bracelet.
In a single season she had won a WPT preliminary title, cashed in the WPT Championship and made a WSOP final table. For a 21-year-old who had taken an hourly job a few months earlier, it was about as fast a rise as the live game allowed.
Wins and final tables after the breakthrough
The results did not stop in 2007. Early in 2008 she played the Aussie Millions in Australia and made two preliminary final tables, finishing fourth in one and seventh in another. On October 3, 2008, she won a second WPT-series preliminary, the $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em event at the sixth annual Festa al Lago Classic, for $84,100.
Swipe the table
| Date | Event | Finish | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2007 | Five Star World Poker Classic $3,000 NLHE | 1st | $337,395 |
| July 2007 | WSOP Event #47 $2,000 NLHE | 4th | $192,876 |
| October 2008 | Festa al Lago Classic $2,500 NLHE | 1st | $84,100 |
By 2010 her live tournament winnings had passed $1 million. The big results came close together, in her early twenties, and have not been matched since. That is a common shape for a tournament career, and one reason why the math of making a living from live poker is harder than a highlight reel suggests.
A long career at smaller stakes
Wroblewski kept playing through the 2010s and into the 2020s, mostly in Las Vegas and mostly at stakes far below the 2007 peak. WSOP.com lists 20 World Series cashes for just over $400,000. Some of the later ones show range across games: in 2019 she finished 11th in a Seven-Card Stud Hi-Lo 8 or Better event for $7,228 and cashed in a Limit Hold’em event, both a long way from the No-Limit Hold’em tournaments that made her name.
In 2021 she cashed in the $10,000 Main Event, finishing 500th for $23,900. WSOP.com also credits her with one Circuit ring, won in an online event on WSOP.com in September 2018. She has three World Series final table appearances and no bracelet.
Her more recent record is that of a working local. In 2025 Card Player logged a string of cashes in Las Vegas events with buy-ins between $250 and $820, among them 29th place in a $600 event at the Wynn Millions in February and ninth in a $300 event at the Summer Open Series on June 29. If you play the daily tournaments on the Strip, those are the fields she has been sitting in. The guide to finding poker near you covers how those rooms and series are structured.
What the record shows
Her live total depends on which database you read. As of mid-2026, The Hendon Mob lists about $1.25 million and Card Player about $1.18 million, the gap coming from which events each source has recorded. Either way, roughly half of it was won in the four months between April and July 2007. The World Series share works the same way. WSOP.com puts her at just over $400,000 from 20 cashes, and nearly half of that comes from the single fourth-place finish in 2007.
Those totals are gross prizes, before buy-ins, travel and any backing deals, and they cover live tournaments only.
They say nothing about cash games or online play.
Vietnam now has poker rooms of its own. Her own results, nineteen years after the satellite, still come from Las Vegas.