Motherhood Has Been a "Total Blessing" for Poker Pro and Chess Master Jen Shahade

Over the last 12 months, Jen Shahade’s (pictured) live tournament results were few and far between. There is good reason for the lack of results from the Philadelphia poker pro. Just over a year ago, she had her first child, Fabian.

The duties of being a mother kept her from traveling all over the globe playing poker tournaments, but now she’s looking to celebrate the one-year mark of motherhood with a deep run in the Season XVI WPT Borgata Winter Poker Open Championship.

The lack of time on the felt doesn’t bother her, especially when compared to the joys of being a mother. She wouldn’t want anybody to think differently about it.

“It’s really hard great overall,” said Shahade. “It’s really hard to think of any negatives of having a kid because I feel before I got pregnant, I was hesitant. Because I heard horror stories from people of how it affected their lives for the negative. So, I don’t really like to perpetuate that myself because it’s been a total blessing.”

As a Pennsylvania native and a Team PokerStars pro, a short ride into New Jersey to play online usually fixes any travel restrictions she has as a parent. Thanks to recent legislation in the state, Shahade will be able to grind on the virtual felt in her home state of Pennsylvania sometime later this year.

Her plans in the foreseeable future are to spend more time grinding online, especially when Pennsylvania introduces online poker, but when she does get out on the road grinding live tournaments, she is sometimes able to bring Fabian along for the ride.

“He really loves seeing new places,” said Shahade. “We went to Ocean City to play one of the NJCOOPs for PokerStars and then we went to the Atlantis a couple weeks ago. So, that’s really fun to be able to share the traveling lifestyle with my one-year-old son.”

During Fabian’s travel to the Atlantis, Shahade picked up her first tournament cash of 2018. It was a seventh-place finish in the $330 no-limit hold’em bounty event at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.

She can’t bring her son everywhere, however, and that will become more frequent as he gets a little older and she travels further away from home. Overall, she’s more than happy with the time she spends with him.

“In the first six months, it’s harder to travel I think for a lot of women,” said Shahade. “After that, I think it depends on your lifestyle. I definitely travel more, so there are definitely more one-week chunks of time where I don’t see him, but I think on a day-to-day basis, compared to other working moms, I see him way more often because I have a very flexible schedule and I can work from home.”

When it comes to teaching Fabian the game, she’s going to start with her other passion.

“I’ll probably start with chess and see how he likes that,” said Shahade.

If there were anybody for Fabian to learn chess from, his mother is as good of a choice as anyone. Shahade already achieved a Master title in the game and is very active in the chess community.

“I don’t play long competitions like this, like one week, but I do a lot of commentary and writing and things like that,” she said about her involvement in the chess community.

Regardless of her finish in this event, Fabian has a great role model to look up to.

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