May 17, 2019
As a ravishing beauty, she earned many a look. But as her stacks of ships mounted higher, they earned many looks.
The competition began with 922 poker-faced players. At the end of the third day, only 32 players remained—including Razavi, who then had the third biggest stack in the competition with more than 2 million chips.
But she got trapped late in the fourth day. Busted, she was eliminated, finishing in 17th place. She fell to Wei Huang of China, who was to finish the tournament in second place.
Razavi had been tearing it up until she faced Huang. After a strong start to the day, Razavi’s bid came to a screeching halt when she flopped flush-under-flush against Huang, one of the few players in the field that had her covered. With no time banks left, there was no escape and Razavi bowed out before the final two tables.
She went home with 36,620 euros ($41,000) in prize money. But that didn’t compare with the winnings of the first place finisher, German Manig Loeser, who took home 603,777 euros ($675,000).
Razavi learned to play poker in her family home at age nine, and she started playing with friends more regularly from 16, and at 21 she was being sponsored to play. Her biggest cash win to date took place in Macau, where she won a tournament for $89,495.
She and her cash game pro boyfriend Alf Martinsson, who were introduced by mutual friends at the gambling tables in Macau, live between Cape Town in the summer, where Melika settled with her family after leaving Iran at 14, and the next six months of each year smashing the European poker scene. Her mom chose South Africa after she fell in love with it years before when she was young.
Melika is 29 now and works both as a poker pro and a personal trainer, although she worked as a professional magician between the ages of 19 and 25.
Melika says her Iranian passport effectively prevents her from participating in tournaments in America, which is the capital of the poker world. So she competes mainly in Europe and the Far East. She competes as an Iranian with the Iranian flag next to her name—which is likely to offend many clerics in Iran when they learn of that.
