First Female WSOP Winner Starla Brodie Passes Away

Recently the poker community received the sad news that two-times World Series of Poker bracelet winner Starla Brodie has sadly passed away.
Hailing from New Jersey, Brodie always had plenty of gamble and in her early career claims to have earned $400,000 in one year trading options at Philadelphia Trading. Poker also featured highly in her list of hobbies and together with her husband Ken, would regularly travel to Las Vegas to compete at the World Series of Poker.
Starla Brodie would subsequently become the first woman ever to win an open-field WSOP bracelet, after teaming up with poker legend Doyle Brunson to take down the 1979 WSOP $600 Mixed Doubles Event for $4,500. Sixteen years later, Starla would then win a second career bracelet, this time at the 1995 WSOP $1k Women’s Seven-Card Stud event for $35,200, after which she proclaimed:
“I’m thrilled to finally win it [having played it for 18 years].”
In so doing, Starla Brodie also became the first woman to earn two WSOP titles, and even now is one of only six women to hold multiple WSOP bracelets.
Starla Brodie’s last WSOP cash may have occurred in 2001, prior to the “Poker Boom,” but in the early days of the male dominated game, she acted as an inspiration to other woman and helped pave the way for many of today’s top female players. One such player is Poker Hall of Famer Linda Johnson, who recently wrote a blog on Starla Brodie’s passing and the profound influence she had on her own poker career. As an extract of Johnson’s blog, states:
“Starla was one of the first women I met in Las Vegas in the late ‘70s. She was a role model to me and inspired me to enter the WSOP in 1980, which subsequently led to my moving to Las Vegas a few weeks later to play poker professionally.. There weren’t a lot of women playing poker when I first started. Starla welcomed me and others into the poker world and made us feel comfortable.”
Goodbye to Starla Brodie, one of poker’s unsung heroes, and our thoughts and heartfelt condolences go out to her family and friends at this sad time.