Pride Month: LGBTQ+ Heroes Inspired Vuilleumier to WSOP Success
June is Pride Month. Dedicated to celebrating and commemorating LGBTQ+ pride, Pride Month is over 50 years old and started after the Stonewall riots, a series of gay liberation protests in 1969.
PokerNews will release a series of articles to mark Pride Month, showcasing the role LGBTQ+ individuals play in our industry and the discrimination they have faced. They will also highlight what they feel can be done to foster greater inclusivity for the LGBTQ+ community in poker.
Poker is a game for everyone, and everyone should feel safe, welcomed, and included, no matter how they identify.
As part of our Pride Month series, today we're speaking with WSOP bracelet winner Alexandre Vuilleumier. The Swiss player, who is gay, started playing poker in early 2005 but didn't start playing full-time until many years later.
"Coming from chess it was a natural progression and I immediately respected the game," he told PokerNews. "I respected it so much that I knew I didn't want to just play it on the side. So I stopped until 2017, which is when I started playing full-time.
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Vuilleumier's Poker Career
Vuilleumier's first recorded cash came at the 2018 World Series of Poker — a respectable 1,554th place in the $565 Colossus. Since then, Vuilleumier has amassed over $2.2 million in live earnings, good enough for second on the Swiss all-time money list behind Linus Loeliger.
In 2022, Vuilleumier final-tabled the EPT London Main Event, finishing third for £296,150 ($334,784). The following year he grabbed his first WSOP bracelet in Event #2: $25,000 High Roller 6-Handed for $1,215,864.
"To win a bracelet is just the epitome of a poker career for sure," he told PokerNews after winning.
"To win a bracelet is just the epitome of a poker career "
However, reactions to his win weren't only positive, something that Vuilleumier felt was "to be expected", especially on social media.
"I was so proud when I won my bracelet last year," Vuilleumier said. "The only bad reactions were after I won, during pride month, that some people wrote some shit on Twitter.
"At the table, people don't see that I'm gay. So anything negative tends to happen on Twitter, which is to be expected."
Vuilleumier is not the first gay bracelet winner, with Vanessa Selbst and Ryan Laplante having won in recent years, two players that he considers his two main heroes.
"They deserve a lot of credit for having fought the good fight. They certainly inspired me to celebrate last year the way I did."
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Poker Community has "Begun to Be More Open"
Although by his own admission, Vuilleumier is "new to poker," he says that the community as a whole has been welcoming.
"I've never had problems with younger people, and the older ones certainly have begun to be more open with the years."
He also feels that despite gay people and players in the community being on the receiving end of abuse and discrimination, there are others who are also worthy of being looked out for.
"As gay people we're quite naturally drawn to the fight vs the old white cis straight rich fat man, so I specifically always try to pay attention to women, who probably suffer the most on the felt. Sometimes foreigners can be attacked. That's why I try to speak to everyone in their own language and the other way around, make them understand that it's rude to talk about someone in a language they don't grasp."
Vuilleumier says that more can be done at events to protect those who are discriminated against. He singled out dealers who are sometimes impacted the hardest.
"Especially the ones where it's a little bit more obvious they're gay. For the older white man who wants to display power, there's a 'double dosis' in their mind, and I imagine it's a bigger problem than for players.
"I'd love to see some specific poker events held for the LGBTQ+ community, maybe incorporating charities or covered by PokerNews."
Based in the United Kingdom, Will started working for PokerNews as a freelance live reporter in 2015 and joined the full-time staff in 2019. He graduated from the University of Kent in 2017 with a B.A. in German. He also holds an NCTJ Diploma in Sports Journalism.
