DAVID BAKER IS USUALLY QUITE ADEPT at reading people. He won his first World Series of Poker bracelet this summer and also final-tabled the prestigious $50,000 Players Championship. You don’t achieve that level of success at the poker table if you can’t correctly infer meaning from the subtle signals people give off.

But when Baker first met Maria Mayrinck, his radar and reading skills couldn’t have been less dialed in. The scene was the 2009 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event, where Baker was the early chip leader, and he stepped outside during a break and asked Mayrinck if she had a lighter. Mayrinck thought he was cute and started to flirt with him. Baker didn’t notice. They struck up a friendship and remained in touch for the next six months, with Mayrinck flirting with him every chance she got and Baker remaining absolutely clueless.

The day before the 2009 WSOP Main Event, Mayrinck was headed to a party at fellow poker pro J.C. Alvarado’s apartment in Panorama Towers, and she sent Baker a flirty text message saying she hoped to see him there. Finally, it registered.

“He finally got it, that, Oh this girl’s flirting with me, let me check it out. To this day, I ask, ‘Why were you so stupid?’” Mayrinck told ALL IN. “He says, to this day, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you could ever be interested in me,’ but I say that’s the worst bluff he ever made. The truth is he just didn’t see it.”

Mayrinck and Baker have been an item ever since that party last July 4, and with his success at the WSOP this summer, she is now identified in the minds of many poker followers as David Baker’s girlfriend first, Maria Mayrinck second. But to think of her that way is to sell short her poker skills and accomplishments as one of the most successful players to emerge from Brazil over the last several years.

Mayrinck has been exposed to poker her whole life. Her father hosted high-stakes games at their home in Rio de Janiero and she frequently traveled with her family to casino destinations. In 2003, like so many people around the world, she caught the No-Limit Hold ’Em bug. A writer and director for Globo TV, the number-one network in Latin America, Mayrinck took some unplanned time off when she injured her knee and had to stay at home and recuperate. A friend convinced her to play online poker, and she immersed herself in the game immediately—on two levels. She began to play quite a bit, but she also applied her media background and started shooting a documentary on three of the top poker players in Brazil. Meanwhile, she kept a blog about the documentary and her personal growth as a poker player, all of which helped her make a name for herself in poker.

“As soon as poker broke out in Brazil, I was with it right from the beginning,” she recalled. “That’s why I’ve had a big following in Brazil, because I was there from the beginning making videos and also helping promote the game and these three guys, so we all sort of built it together.”

PokerStars soon came calling, wanting to add Mayrinck to their roster of pros, and as much as she wanted to accept the offer, she couldn’t—at least not at first.

“I come from an old school, traditional Brazilian family, and there’s no way their daughter is going to be a poker player. My family was very against it, so that’s why I had to start out more in media, blogging for PokerStars, to kind of ease my family into it. After like two years of doing media and playing at the same time, and also working for TV, I realized I wasn’t doing any of the things very well and I needed to commit fully to one of them. So I decided I was going to give poker a shot. I did a whole Excel presentation to my family—they’re all investment bankers, so they can understand things like Excel files and math. I explained to them about EV and long-term profitability and told them that it was the same thing that they were doing. So they finally got behind it, and nowadays they support me.”

When she first started playing, even Mayrinck wasn’t sure how supportive she should be of herself. Playing under the screen name “Maridu,” her online career got off to a great start when she won one of the first tournaments she entered. As a result, she assumed the game was easy to beat, didn’t put much effort into learning strategy, and embarked on a nasty losing streak. She made numerous re-deposits. For the first year or so, aside from that one tournament at the beginning, all she did was bleed money. But she stuck with it until she turned it around.

“You know how everybody has these Cinderella stories, like, ‘I won a freeroll and I never made a deposit?’ My story is completely the opposite,” she laughed. “I did everything wrong in the beginning. Winning that tournament was the worst thing that could happen to me because you think you know something but you’ve only been playing the game for three months and you obviously know nothing. It takes a lot of time and experience and humility to see that you don’t know anything, and then that’s when you’re capable of starting to learn something.

“All that losing, that was what made me learn about bankroll management, about slowing moving up the stakes, about the forums, the books. I really became a big student of the game. In poker, the graph is not a straight line up. It goes up and down, and as long as it keeps going up overall, that’s okay. It seems kind of backwards, but for me, the moment when I knew I could be a successful poker player was after I’d been losing for a while and I realized that there’s a skill to it and that I could develop those skills.”

Mayrinck started out playing mostly sit & gos on PokerStars, but she quickly made the transition to cash games and multi-table tournaments. She’s currently spending a lot of time bettering her knowledge of mixed games, and that learning curve has been greatly accelerated by watching her boyfriend in action.

“Watching him, even if he’s not telling me what he’s doing, it’s so good for my game,” she said. “The most impressive thing about David is that he just doesn’t tilt. I’ve seen him go on $60,000 swings either way, and he doesn’t flinch. That’s what I need to learn, because I get emotionally involved, I tilt. He has that mindset that the players who win have. Phil Ivey has that. To them, it’s another day at the office. Once you get to that mental state, you’re always making the best play. But if you get emotionally tangled in it, you can’t really evaluate if you’re playing well or poorly. And I’m the stereotype of the hot-blooded Latin woman. That’s me, and it’s very hard to overcome it.”

Despite that handicap, Mayrinck has managed to rack up a solid live resume: six WSOP cashes in the last three years, including back-to-back top-50 finishes in the WSOP ladies championship in ’08 and ’09. She hasn’t quite had that breakthrough score yet that proves she’s among the elite (her personal best is $20,377 at last October’s EPT London main event), but little by little, she’s establishing herself as a “name” player and a threat in major tournaments.

Unfortunately, her boyfriend has overshadowed her with his exploits this summer. But that’s just fine with Mayrinck. Her time will come. And in the meantime she’s happy to sweat her better half from the rail, watching him read his opponents better than he could ever read her.