It’s In The Cards: Jen Cassell & Bert Perry’s Excellent Adventure

Excellent! While the main characters in this story are certainly not slackers, there is a lot of traveling involved (just not the time traveling type) and a lot of feel good adventures from this young, fun-loving duo.

Meet Jennifer Cassell and Bert Perry

Meet Jennifer Cassell aka Jen Cassell and John Perry aka Bert Perry, a pair of poker professionals touring the Asia-Pacific circuit as a real-life couple. The young Aussie pair have been traveling together for 4 years now, making their individual marks in the live tournament scene, sometimes even competing against each other, and just last year, winning the Tag Team Event at the 2024 U Series of Poker Grand Finale in Hai Phong. Bert has been named the 2023 GPI Australia Player of the Year while Jen has picked up four titles since last year. A winning pair indeed.

Let’s Make A Deal

Bert Perry fully committed to playing the professional scene in 2019, shipping his first two event titles including one at the World Poker Tour Gold Coast. He would finish the year, collecting a respectable $ 57,727 in prize money. Meanwhile Jen Cassell took up the game in her home city of Brisbane, playing more for socials in what she once described as “pub poker” with a buy-in of $4 and a prize pot of $50.

The two crossed paths post-covid when Bert was trying get his poker groove back since the pandemic, hovering in the Australian Poker circuit while Jen was working as a dealer at one of the tournaments he was entered in. Was it love at first hand? 

In a recent interview, Bert Perry revealed that their first meeting was just like a poker game: a bit of luck and skill plus a lot of reading the room. Perry recounts,

So back then, she was dealing, and I was playing. Then she took a day off on the last day of the series, and I was playing a tournament. She kept handing me a beer every 10 minutes. I’m like, okay, alright. This is interesting. I ended up winning the tournament, and the rest is history.

That tournament was the Australian Poker Tour Brisbane and their history as a touring couple began. At first Jen was not quite sure she could make a living playing professionally like Bert, so she kept her day job as dealer. But one tournament, where Perry was again competing in, she had a falling out with her employer. Seeing how bad her day was going, Bert coaxed her into a dare,

Go and play the $45 6-max, which is on today, just quit your job, go play, have fun, I’ll put you into the tournament.

Jen Cassell ended up winning the event and cashing more than  $10,000. There was no looking back from then on.

All In

Since 2022, the poker careers of Jen Cassell and Bert Perry seem to have run parallel in its rising success. For Bert, he more than doubled his live earnings with $ 132,939 while Jen picked up where she left off, earning her best live cash to date of more than $70,000 by winning the Main Event of the 2022 Gold Coast Champs and making a first appearance at the 53rd World Series of Poker – WSOP 2022 in Las Vegas. The two young Australians’ gamble of touring the live poker circuit together seems to be paying off nicely. As Bert observes,

On these trips, it’s quite easy for us because normally if you have a partner, a girlfriend, a spouse, whatever, and you’re going away for 12-hour days for 10 days straight, you’ve got to leave them at the hotel or figure something out to do. It’s kind of a big ask. But we’re both very understanding. If Jen’s got a deep run and I want to do something, I’ll just do it alone or I won’t, or I’ll go and sweat her or whatever, and vice versa. So it’s good like that.

And sometimes, the best memories don’t come in the wins.

We final-tabled the deep stack together (in WPT Cambodia), which was cool. We came eighth and seventh. Not a very good result; it wasn’t our best performance. But yeah, I’ve knocked her out of a final table before. She’s knocked me out, I think once or twice. We were at the same table for a little bit, like 20 or 30 left. It was very exciting because you’ve got six figures. So that was cool.

All Is Fair In Hearts And Aces

While 2023 saw Cassell in fewer tournaments, the year was a banner one for Bert. He cashed in $ 597,307 with a career best live earning of $ 105,487 capturing his first ever High Roller Event of the  World Poker Tour Prime Cambodia. This also signaled a year the dynamic duo started shifting to the Asian circuit with Perry clinching two more High Roller titles in the U Series of Poker Ha Noi and Da Nang. These highlight wins together with a consistent performance in the Australian tournaments pushed Bert Perry in rankings to secure the 2023 Global Poker Index (GPI) Player of the Year.

Though Jen’s earnings were down from the previous year, arriving on Asian turf would be another springboard for more success on the felt in the years to follow. In 2024, Cassell nabbed her most impressive win outside her home country, clinching the Mini Main Event of the USOP Taiwan. And to cap off the year, why not a title for the two – together? In December 2024, Team Jen-Bert emerged victorious in the Tag Team Event of the USOP Grand Finale Hai Phong. Sweet. Bert assesses.

Jen’s had an incredible run the last couple of years. She’s really put in a lot of work, and now she’s reaping the rewards. She’s had a lot of success, and I’m hitting my stride as well, six years straight being full-time in tournaments. So yeah, I think we’re doing really well, and it’s been a wild ride. It does have its ups and downs if you’re both down-swinging at the same time.

Jen Cassell now tops the Women’s 2025 Player of the Year Race for Australia while Bert Perry has surpassed the $ 1,000,000 milestone. He has also recently signed with the Australian Poker Open as brand ambassador.

Full House

Off the felt, there’s no place like home for the two young Aussies. Bert describes life away from the tour,

When we’re at home, we just rest a lot. I’ll play a bit online, so I’ll sort of play Sundays online and then a couple of days a week usually, at least, just to stay sharp. Then we’ll do a little bit of study and mostly just relax. Especially for the last two years, we’ve been playing a lot of live poker, way a lot, not having much downtime at home. So, when we’re home, it’s good to just chill out a bit. We live in Sunshine Coast, and it’s a beachy sort of series of beach towns in Australia, and we’re near the beach. We’ve got Jen’s dog, Wilson, who’s about to turn five, and he’s a lovely pooch. We just take him to the beach and relax, drink coffee, and stuff. It’s a good lifestyle. And then we gear up and go away for the trip.

Aside from the furry baby, the couple also have two housemates who fill their down time with board and yes, card games.

For Jen and Bert, their excellent adventure continues. Like Poker, luck and a steady hand played a big part in finding the sweet spot for balancing a life on tour. As Bert describes it,

Poker has always been there in our relationship. I would say it’s probably not like that for everyone if you’re both playing as a couple. It’s definitely challenging for us. It seems to work really well. We’ve got a nice groove, and I take the bad beats a little bit worse than she does. She kind of laughs them off, and that’s super important. She was very, very supportive, so I knew that was pretty special because especially if you’re in a new relationship and your boyfriend’s just miserable, losing money all the time, maybe you want to check out. But she was there the whole time, and now things are going better. So life’s good. And I would say I’ve learned to be a bit tougher around Jen.

And with that excellent life comes some excellent advice,

I would say be communicative and then also try to spend a lot of quality time or as much as you can. Make time to hang out together away from the tables. It’s tempting, and sometimes we do this too much, where you just play a series, jump to the next one, and jump to the next one. But yeah, definitely make time, go out, and date still and go see stuff together.

Party on Jen and Bert!

Article by Mike Alcazaren