Annette Obrestad returns to poker
The infamous "Annette_15" is back at the tables and Barry Carter explains why that could be great for the game.
I had a non-meme tweet go "poker viral" last week (poker viral is tiny compared to actual viral), where I fanboyed Annette Obrestad, who recently did an interview with PokerOrg about her return to poker.
Annette_15 remains for me the coolest online poker “character” of the boom years and no I’m not saying that for lefty clout because she’s a girl.
The tiny young scandi assassin beating up all the old school pros back in the day, proper Queens Gambit stuff.
Hope she wins… https://t.co/pH65CzpRJg
— Barry Carter (@Barry_Carter) March 14, 2026
It's very welcome news to see Annette back. In my opinion, she is the ultimate online player of the boom era, and we really fudged things in this industry by not hanging onto her.
Whether she can make it in the modern game remains to be seen, but I suspect she can, and it might still be a fairytale story.
A sign of how poker had changed
Annette_15 was called so because she famously played underage in the early boom years. Not something to be promoted in and of itself, and her youth was one of the reasons we were not to be able to hype her as much as we wanted.
She also won the first-ever World Series of Poker Europe Main Event in 2007, aged just 19. Meaning that she was unable to go to Vegas as a champion for another two years.
It was her youth, however, that made her so compelling as a poker star. At the time, the game was only just coming out of the seedy underground image it had. Most poker players were older, male and American.
Seeing a tiny young Norwegian girl beating up the biggest names in poker was about as jarring as it got. It was a big sign that poker was a completely different game from the one we saw on shows like Late Night Poker and the WSOP broadcast.
She also famously won a PokerStars 180-man SNG without looking at her cards (except for when she faced an all-in). Demonstrating the new, more aggressive zeitgeist in poker strategy.
Still time to write the story
I'm not sure what compelled her to leave the game, although how many of us want to continue doing something we did at 15? She spent a long time as a successful makeup vlogger after leaving poker:
Because she was so young, her sponsorship opportunities were limited. But we should have held onto her in this industry, because she really gave us poker's version of the Queen's Gambit before we even knew we needed it.
I'm holding out hope that her return leads to something impressive, because the Annette Obrestad story is one we might finally be able to sell to the wider world.
