Before Betting

Joanna Krupa was born in April, 1981 in Warsaw, Poland. She is the daughter of hotelier Steven Krupa and she has two younger sisters. She moved to the U.S. with her mother and sisters when she was five and they lived in Chicago, Illinois. The city’s West Side was a big Polish Community so the family settled there. For several years, Joanna attended a Polish school before enrolling in a local community college in nearby Lombard, Illinois. However, she soon dropped out to pursue a career in modeling. As a model, she has done runway work and has represented such companies as Sketchers shoes, Venus Swimwear, Dollhouse Clothing, and Fredericks of Hollywood. Joanna has also appeared in practically every fashion magazine and men’s magazine available. She has done covers and pictorials for GQ, FHM, Personal, Inside Sport, Stuff, Steppin’ Out, Men’s Fitness, and Maxim. In Maxim, she made it to #61 on their 2006 Hot 100 list, and was voted German Maxim’s Model of the Year for 2004-2005. She was the featured Model of the Week in Askmen.com. The Australian bestselling magazine TV Media voted her one of the Top 10 Supermodels of 2004.

Joanna has stated that she is a fan of poker and plays online. Joanna’s first experience with poker actually turned out to be her first big win. She had previously done a photoshoot for Donald Trump’s magazine Trump World and was invited to the Trump Towers in Atlantic City. When she got there, she was invited to sit down to a charity tournament against the magazine’s editors and the cast of The Apprentice. To her surprise, first time player Joanna won the $1 million charity tournament.

In 2006, she was signed by TitanPoker.com to be their official spokesperson. She played regularly on Titan and used the site to sharpen up her skills for her first big tournament, the World Series of Poker. Despite having only played poker for about a year prior to the event, Joanna made an impressive show at the WSOP Main Event. Sporting a TitansPoker t-shirt, she advanced far into the second round, beating out 5,000 competitors and outlasting celebrities like Jennifer Tilly, Shannon Elizabeth, and pros like Greg Raymer. It was only her second tournament to ever play in and she garnered some respect by making it through eleven grueling hours during the second round before being knocked out. She stated that her looks did not help her at all because most of the players were concentrating on their hands and not being distracted by the people around them.

Joanna Krupa