WHEN A GORGEOUS BLONDE MODEL/ACTRESS suddenly arrives on the poker scene, she is traditionally met with unanimous skepticism by the hardcore players. Think Pam Anderson partnering up with Doyle Brunson to launch a site back in 2006. So when Christina Lindley got involved in poker in the summer of 2008, yes, she turned heads, but nobody took her all that seriously.

Last November, she finished second in a 10,000-player tournament in the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) and turned her $129 buy-in into a $106,460 score. Goodbye, skepticism. Christina Lindley can play the game.

“It’s really funny, when I took second in that FTOPS, no one believed it was me,” she told ALL IN. “People were saying on the forums that it had to be a guy who used ‘christinalindley’ as his screen name. But now, gradually, when people see me playing online, they’re starting to recognize that it’s actually me.”

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Lindley moved from Nashville to Los Angeles about five years ago to pursue acting and modeling, and found instant success as a cover girl for major fitness magazines. She went on to an assortment of acting jobs, including joining the famed comedy troupe The Groundlings, appearing in the movie The Marine, and sharing the screen briefly with Larry David on an episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Lindley’s father introduced her to poker on a random trip to a Mississippi casino in ’08 that saw her sit down at a low-stakes Limit Hold ’Em table and come away a winner despite having little understanding of the game. When the ugly Writers’ Guild strike hit in 2007/2008, Lindley was temporarily out of work and rather bored, so she took a hosting workshop. One assignment was to write a show about a subject that interested her, so she chose poker and researched it by spending time with poker pros and diving headfirst into the poker lifestyle. Before she knew it, she was playing the game nonstop.

“I consider myself a professional poker player now,” she said. “I’m playing poker more than I’m doing anything else. I’m still modeling and acting. I actually booked a movie that I’m going to be shooting this summer in Philadelphia called MIMO. It’s one of my first lead roles, so I’m excited about that. But I told them that absolutely I will not miss the World Series of Poker Main Event!”

For her first year or so of playing, Lindley was purely a live player. She entered four WSOP tournaments in ’09 (no cashes, but a couple of decent runs), and while in Vegas for the Series, she spent time with several online pros and soon found herself dabbling in that arena. Now she plays online considerably more than live, sometimes grinding the internet tournaments for 12 hours a day.

“Pretty much every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I’m playing online tournaments,” she explained. “I like to multi-table, but I can’t do eight or 12 tables like some of the online pros. For me, three is ideal and five is the absolute max.”

Poker isn’t the only thing Lindley does online. She’s very into Twitter (you can follow her at Twitter.com/lindleyloo) and, of course, has her own web site (www.christinalindley.net). You can use those sources to keep up on all of her latest career developments—which at the moment include upcoming appearances on the FOX News shows FOX And Friends and Red Eye.

But for someone who moved to L.A. to be a model and actress and does get steady work in both professions, it’s somewhat unusual that she’d prefer to be holed up by herself, playing poker tournaments on her computer, rather than out performing for the snapping or rolling cameras.

Clearly, Lindley is serious about poker. And clearly, based on her FTOPS score and other cashes since, she deserves to be taken seriously at the poker table.