Liu is playing for a Chair
By Randall Rapp

It’s no wonder Joanne “J.J.” Liu has found both fame and fortune in the world of poker. She has both a winning smile and a winning game, packaged with an easy-going personality. She also hasa fashion flair at final tables that she giggles at the mention of, and dismisses as “just kind of a girl thing.”

When she sits down at a poker table, however, it’s much more than just a “girl thing” going on. With 10 World Series of Poker cashes and six on the World Poker Tour (including second place at the recent Bay 101 Shooting Stars tournament), this Palo Alto resident has quickly become one of the hottest tournament players of any gender.

Liu was born in Taipei, Taiwan, where she learned Chinese gambling games from her family at an early age and later graduated from Ming Chuan College. From there she went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. In 1988 she moved to Palo Alto to work for Space Systems/Loral as an engineer.

On a skiing trip to Tahoe in 1996 she first came across Texas Hold ’em, and soon was a regular player at the Bay 101 Casino as well as Garden City, Lucky Chances and Artichoke Joe’s. She also had her first WSOP cash that year, taking 4th place in a Limit Hold ’em event.

She’s very pleased, as well she should be, with her results so far, especially her runner-up finish in the recent Shooting Stars tournament. “I wish I can win it,” she said. “But at the end the blinds are so big it gets like a crapshoot. It’s like playing Blackjack. You can’t muck anymore.

“I feel very good. Everything’s good. I have nothing to complain [about]. My opponent [Ted Forrest] was a top professional for like 20 years. I just started like two years ago as a professional. I had never played him before.”

Liu says she brings a threefold strategy to a poker tournament. First is mathematics—figuring things like pot odds and making adjustments based on them. Second is psychology—she likes to categorize her opponents’ personality types based on 16 animals—elephant, monkey, etc. Third is using the tactics and philosophies found in Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” “I learned a lot from his philosophy. A lot of his strategy works for tournaments.”

She obviously comes by her poker skills “honestly,” as her mother—80-something-year-old Kuei Chi Chang—has become a force to be reckoned with, both as a regular at Artichoke Joe’s and in tournaments. She entered her first ever poker tournaments at last year’s WSOP. In one of the events she even found herself with Phil Helmuth on her right and Barry Shulman on her left. Undeterred, she went on to cash in that tournament as well as the other one she entered.

Liu’s husband, Dan Alspach, is also a poker player. In fact, the two met when she knocked him out of the WSOP Main Event back in 1999. He retired in 2003 as founder, CEO and president of Orincon Corporation when the company was acquired by Lockheed-Martin.

He was also once a professor of engineering at UC San Diego. Last year Alspach and Liu endowed the Daniel L. Alspach Endowed Chair in Dynamic Systems and Controls at the Jacobs School of Engineering/Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCSD. “When we win money, it goes in that ­direction,” Liu said of their philanthropic endeavor, bringing new meaning to the expression, “a chip and a chair.”