Poker Skills for Everyday Life from a Professional Poker Player

When Daiva started playing poker, just 2% of players were women. That baptism of fire, personal growth and the vast skill set poker taught her power Fifty-Two today. With a stacked resume as a poker ambassador for leading brands, and a live host for ladies' events at huge festivals, her seminars, workshops and poker events are a culmination of everything she’s learned at the tables and beyond.

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Daiva Byrne 
Founder of Fifty-Two

After starting her career in the City of London at Ernst & Young and then moving to Thomson Reuters, Daiva’s growing passion for poker ultimately led her to quit in 2011 to become a professional player.
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As the years progressed, Daiva travelled across the world playing poker as far afield as Melbourne, Lima, and of course, most summers in Vegas. One thing was clear at the tables: the lack of female participation, and increasing this became another mission. In 2017, she founded FLIP (Fantastic Ladies in Poker ) to support, celebrate, and grow women’s involvement in poker. Over the last 9 years, this has grown into the world’s largest female-only poker community with over 9,300 members.
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Daiva has also spent the last decade working with live poker festivals to host ladies' events and as a partner with the world’s largest online operator encouraging diversity and providing a welcoming environment for those making their first forays into the game. To date, she's hosted over 30 events in 12 different countries. 
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As she increasingly shared the myriad skills poker had taught her with other FLIP community members, she began to see the value of bringing them to a wider audience, especially since she wished she’d known many of them when starting out in the corporate world. After numerous requests for speaking engagements and poker workshops, she decided to start Fifty-Two.
Her mission: to share her invaluable skills in a fun and engaging way through the prism of poker, and to empower teams and business leaders, especially women, to help drive success and careers to the heights they deserve.  And to have fun at the poker tables.

John Byrne 
Co-Founder

John has worked at and founded businesses in media and advertising over the last twenty-five years. After starting his first ecommerce business back in 2008 with winnings from poker, he started further successful businesses in 2013 and 2015.
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The skills he learned from poker in the early noughties, in no small way, provided him with the foundations required to take the plunge and to go all in on the journey of turning his ideas into success.
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All entrepreneurs need risk appetite and management, confidence, and to continue pursuing their goals despite the adversities they inevitably face. Poker provides a brilliant grounding in this and much more. 
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Combining his business and corporate knowledge with the extensive skills that Daiva has gone on to master as a professional player has provided an exciting opportunity to teach this to other teams and businesses through Fifty-Two. 
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Outside of the business world, John is a published author with his novel The Rich List under his pen name of Ben Saxon, hitting the shelves back in 2023. He can also sometimes be found back at the poker tables, honing and learning new skills.

Eliane Hawley
Event Expert: Confidence & Psychology

Eliane is a actor with numerous TV, Film and Theatre credits. She also teaches at some of the pre-eminent UK drama schools, and provides corporate training in objection handling, psychology, confidence and more. She adds an extra dimension of knowledge around key elements of poker skills and blends these together in informative and engaging workshops prior to our events. If you are wanting to to learn about confidence building during your event with Fifty-Two, Eliane might just have the answers.