Marle Cordeiro is one of the most controversial and popular influencers in poker. Her videos polarise big names and fans alike, but her channel enjoys viewing figures that few in the game will ever reach. How did Marle get to where she is? It began with one video.
Who is Marle Cordeiro?
Marle Cordeiro is a self-described “poker player living in Las Vegas, NV.” Marle is known as a cash game player, with her current live winnings listed at a little under $14,000 – enough to place her in the top 50,000 of the United States All Time Money List.
Alongside playing the game, Marle also runs a successful vlog that has taken her from a little known player to one of the most popular poker vloggers on the planet in just a few short months. Below we’ve looked at how Marle’s journey has unfolded.
She first dreamt of being a model
After graduating from West Boylston Middle/High School as part of the class of 2009, Marle moved to New York with a dream of becoming a model. However, after being told she was too short to model professionally, she moved towards acting and writing.
Like many people trying to break into the film and TV industry, Marle found it a struggle to pick up roles and find takers for her scripts. The struggle became so intense that she left NYC and headed to Las Vegas, where her father was living.
Hitting the Vegas poker halls
While in Vegas, Marle worked as a waitress and hit the poker halls in her spare time – starting at $1-3 stakes Texas hold 'em, before graduating to $2-5 stake games at the world famous Bellagio casino.
After a couple of years of playing while waitressing, Marle quit her job with the aim of becoming a poker professional – something she was able to do after receiving financial backing from friends.
Credit: YouTube
Making the push to go pro
Once Marle made the move to full-time poker, she spent long hours at the Vegas casinos putting in the graft to make it as a rounder. But after five months playing day and night, she was no closer than when she started – in fact, she was near broke.
Something needed to change and, for Marle, this meant altering her state of mind or going back to waitressing – the latter wasn’t an option. She approached the tables with renewed focus, vigour, and began winning.
Turning to vlogging
Marle’s vlog, Marle, was created in Oct 2011 but it was nearly seven years before a video was uploaded to it. Once Marle began vlogging, she quickly hit on a winning formula – she usually begins with a funny intro, before covering poker hand analysis, discussing her life as a rounder, and covering the role of women in poker.
Though it took Marle years to publish the first video to her vlog, she needed only a month to start generating huge traffic and it was all the result of one video – Looking For A Poker Pro Boyfriend, which has been viewed over 95,000 times.
How one satirical video made her go viral
Looking For A Poker Pro Boyfriend sees Marle taking a satirical look at the role of women in poker, tackling the idea they only make their way in the game by having romantic relationships with male players. The video also sees Marle run through hand analysis, along with some poker strategy.
In the space of a few days, Marle’s channel jumped from a few thousand video views to over ten thousand followers. Part of this attention came from fellow poker influencers – less than a month after the release of Looking For A Poker Pro Boyfriend, Joe Ingram posted on Instagram that he and Marle would be podcasting together. This post attracted comments from many poker influencers, including Justin Bonomo, Jamie Kerstetter, and Kelly Minkin.
How controversy made Marle really popular
The comments Marle received from Justin Bonomo, Jamie Kerstetter, and Kelly Minkin questioning whether Looking For A Poker Pro Boyfriend caused more harm than good to female poker players. Marle responded to the controversy in a video titled How many HATERS do I have in poker?
Marle begins by saying that the most important thing for her is “trying to inspire intelligent women to get involved in [the] game.” She states that the footage in Looking… was a “fictional, exaggerated sketch,” one that addresses the stereotype that women couldn’t have become professional poker players by any reason other than their looks – something that Marle says is “absurd.”
Where does she go from here?
Marle’s channel now has well over 20,000 subscribers and Online Casinos place her alongside names like Andrew Neeme, James “SplitSuit” Sweeney, and Doug Poulk as one of the poker vloggers you should know and watch. But is her popularity sustainable? The viewing figures for her channel suggest so.
In February 2019, only four months after the release of her first video, Getting CRUSHED in Poker - LIVE AT THE BIKE was published and has received 58,000 views to date, while her most recent one has been watched more than 39,000 times.
In the sixth months between October 2018 (the release of her first video) and April 2019 (the time this article was written), Marle Cordeiro has become more popular than most poker influencers could dream of. She’s spoken of in the same breath as some of the most influential names in poker and continues to enjoy great viewings for her YouTube channel, all because of one controversial video.
