Melanie 'Callisto 5' Weisner

Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Melanie Weisner is a professional poker player that specialises in tournament and heads-up play. Inspired to start playing the game after seeing her brother achieve some success online, Weisner deposited to PokerStars whilst studying at New York University and had a meteoric rise over a short period. Managing to balance her studies with her love for poker, Melanie – playing under the screenname 'Callisto 5' – racked up more than $600,000 in online MTT winnings alone in a four-year period. According to her page on Official Poker Rankings, she ranked in the top 0.05% of tournament players in 2009 and 2010 consecutively.

Weisner began dividing her time between live and online play in 2009 and has won more than $800,000 in live tournament winnings ever since. She has two EPT titles to her name, along with a WPT title earned in 2012 when she took down the $1,000 No Limit Hold'em Six-Handed event in Johannesburg for $41,289. Her speciality of short-handed and more specifically heads-up play is reflected in her tournament successes in these formats. She finished runner-up in the 2012 EPT €5,000 No Limit Hold'em Heads-Up event in Monte Carlo. In an all-female final showdown, Weisner lost out to Englishwoman Victoria Coren Mitchell in a moment that was significant for the representation of women on the live poker scene.

Along with offering private and group coaching available through her own website, Melanie lives an interesting life away from the felt. In September of 2017, she directed Nicky Silver's 'Pterodactyls' for a four weekend run at the Commissary at the Culver Studios in California. She is also a very talented vocalist with a trained background in vocal performance from NYU. If you want to catch a performance of hers, there's a video of her singing the U.S. national anthem with fellow female poker pro Maria Ho: 

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