ONE LOOK AT JAYDE NICOLE – PERHAPS IN A TIGHT DRESS at a nightclub, perhaps in a bikini on the beach, perhaps in far less than that on the pages of Playboy – serves as a strong reminder that not all women are created equal.

Some women are born with certain assets that set them apart and give them advantages in the game of life. If you’re blessed with the right proportions, opportunity doesn’t just knock; it busts the door off its hinges. You still have to decide for yourself what you’re going to make of the opportunity, but it never hurts to have the natural gifts that lure opportunity into your foyer.

The modern cycle of celebrity is such that Jayde’s looks created many opportunities for her, she took advantage of those opportunities and gained fame, and now her fame has brought her even more opportunities. The latest opportunity comes in the world of poker, where not all players are created equal, nor are the learning curves they must face.

And Jayde Nicole has begun a journey that could provide her with the most accelerated learning curve since George Costanza discovered the power of abstinence.

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If you aren’t familiar with Jayde Nicole, well, that probably indicates a little something about your age. But it’s okay. We’ll catch you up. The Canadian-born beauty was the Playboy Playmate of the Month in the January 2007 issue at just 20 years of age, and in the June 2008 issue, she was named Playmate of the Year.

She took her fame beyond the men’s magazine circuit soon thereafter when she started dating Brody Jenner, the son of Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner and a star/character/actor on the hard-to-categorize, reality-ish MTV program The Hills. Jayde appeared in four episodes on the fifth season of the show, which instantly turned her into a magnet for the gossip rags and TMZs of the world. When she and Brody had a physical altercation outside a nightclub in August with Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis, it was a major story in the twisted world of celebrity news. Who cares about the state of the world economy or war in Iraq? Did you hear Brody got Tasered?! This is the bizarre culture we live in. And whether your father or his father have ever heard of her or not, to today’s teenagers and young adults, Jayde is breaking through to serious star status.

The question now is, will she become a star of the poker world?

Jayde Nicole has been chosen to be the subject of the ultimate poker experiment, the “ALL IN Magazine Project.” Over the course of the next year, she’ll get the kind of poker education it took ol’ Texas Dolly a decade or more to acquire on the road-gambling circuit. She’s beginning as, well, a beginner. And by next year’s World Series of Poker, when she plays the Main Event (as well as a few smaller events) in the culmination of the Project, she’ll have to be world-class. So how is she going to go from newbie to shark in so little time? With a little help from ALL IN’s friends.

For the ALL IN Magazine Project, each month, Jayde will be taking a lesson from a different elite pro.

Most people who succeed in some particular specialty in life have a great teacher; Jayde will have a dozen great teachers. Whether having that many teachers with that many different philosophies will ultimately screw her up is one of the great intrigues of the Project. But in all likelihood, if she can take a little something from each pro who imparts his or her knowledge, she’ll have a massive edge over everyone trying to learn the game via traditional methods. One thing is for sure: Whether she succeeds or fails, Jayde is taking this opportunity very seriously.

“As soon as I knew I had the option of being trained by world champions and professionals who could help
me become a really good poker player and start beating all the boys at poker, I was really, really excited.”

“As soon as I talked to [ALL IN Publisher] Kasey [Thompson] the first time about this, I was like, ‘All right, when are we starting? When’s my first lesson?’” Jayde said. “I’ve always been kind of interested in poker, and my boyfriend Brody is really into poker, so he’s so jealous that I get to do this. As soon as I knew I had the option of being trained by world champions and professionals who could help me become a really good poker player and start beating all the boys at poker, I was really, really excited.”

Jayde had played in one celebrity invitational tournament in 2008 and a couple of home games with Brody and his friends, but for all intents and purposes, she was starting from scratch. The ALL IN Magazine Project officially began on July 29, the day of the Celebrity- Media Invitational Tournament that kicked off the Legends of Poker series at the Bicycle Casino in southern California. About 15 minutes before she had to walk the red carpet for the event, Jayde met her first teacher: 2006 world champion Jamie Gold.

“I went all in a bunch of times and people were too afraid to call me because they didn’t know if I knew what I was doing. Using the all-in move, when my chip stack got down to a certain level, definitely worked for me.”

“It was kind of like an express lesson in poker,” she said of her 15 minutes with the all-time leader on the tournament money board. “He focused on good and bad starting hands, position, and situations for going all in. He ended up sitting at the table with me, coaching me between hands. He was telling me hands that I thought were good hands that were actually terrible hands, and hands that I thought were bad hands that were actually good hands. I didn’t know anything about position, so he taught me a little about that. Like, I would get a K-J suited and he’d be like, ‘Oh don’t play that,’ because I was out of position.

“Then later in the tournament, I went all in a bunch of times and people were too afraid to call me because they didn’t know if I knew what I was doing. So I took a lot of pots doing that. Using the all-in move, like Jamie taught me to do when my chip stack got down to a certain level, definitely worked for me.”

Indeed it did – in her first tournament under Gold’s tutelage, she came through a field of 115 players to reach the final three tables. It’s not quite what Gold did at the ’06 Series, but it wasn’t bad for a beginner.

From there, Gold gave her two pieces of advice: Practice online and read every Hold ’Em book you can get your hands on. He gave her a list of books to order, and Jayde started with Dan Harrington’s Harrington On Hold ’Em, plowing through it obsessively whenever she wasn’t playing tournaments at ClubUWin.com, one of the sites where you pay an inexpensive monthly fee to compete for modest prizes and tournament points.

How effective were the teachings of Harrington, her unofficial second teacher? She actually won a tournament on ClubUWin.com. First place out of 900 entrants.

Now she was getting a little bit closer to what Gold accomplished in the Main Event of the 2006 WSOP.

David “The Maven” Chicotsky is not yet a household name in the world of live poker, but there are those who will tell you there isn’t a better online tournament player on the planet, and there are also those who will tell you there isn’t a more effective teacher in the world. Chicotsky charges $1,000 for a 12-hour day of teaching at his Las Vegas training center, and aspiring online pros gladly pay that amount. So he must be doing something right.

When Jayde walked into his poker dojo for her second official lesson of the ALL IN Magazine Project, she was immediately overwhelmed by all of the computers and TV screens and the intensity of it all. This was not going to be a casual 15-minute lesson like she’d had with Gold. This was going to be seven hours of all-business Hold ’Em strategy from a man who never even told her his real name. He asked Jayde to call him “Maven,” and moments later, school was in session.

“That was definitely a surreal experience, going into the training center,” Jayde explained. “It’s like you’re at school, we’re sitting at desks with notepads and Maven talks to us about different styles of play and what we have to be looking for. There was definitely a lot of information. Then we got to go in and actually watch some of the people play online poker – watching them play five or six games at the same time, I couldn’t even keep up with which games he was playing at what time.

“I’m a somewhat conservative player. I try to switch it up a little, but generally, I’m pretty conservative. And Maven taught me to be more aggressive. He taught me that I had to be aggressive, I didn’t have a choice. And every time I was like, ‘But what about this?’ he was like, ‘Nope, you have to do this.’ It definitely broke down my boundaries and made me switch up my game a little bit from how I was used to playing. So that’s something I took away from that lesson, and it has worked to my advantage so far. I don’t go as aggressive as he is because he is absolutely crazy with how he plays, but it definitely pushed me to be a little bit more aggressive when I play.”

Jayde has about 10 more months – and 10 more teachers – to figure out exactly how much aggression to incorporate into her game. Who will those teachers be? Well, what fun would it be if we told you – or her – exactly who’s coming up and when? But we will say this much: There will be more world champions, including one who might just teach her how to be a brat at the table. There will be one teacher who can help her not only win a bracelet next year, but perhaps win two back to back. There will be one who, like Chicotsky, is better known for his bold five-letter nickname than the name his parents gave him.

In each issue of ALL IN between now and the WSOP, Jayde will update us on her progress –who taught her that month, what she learned, what results she has experienced.

Also, starting soon, you’ll be able to put Jayde to the test yourself on PokerStars, where she’ll be playing under her own name and hosting her own tournaments. So in a way, you have a chance to play a role in the ALL IN Magazine Project too simply by logging on to PokerStars.

But all along the way, Jayde will have one singular goal in mind: the 2010 World Series of Poker. “I’m already nervous for it even though it’s so far away,” she said. “I watch it on TV, and I see people trash-talking, and I’m like, ‘I will cry if they talk to me that way.’ But the idea is to continue training and continue playing a lot of tournaments throughout the year and play in the WSOP and see how far I can go.”

If this were a scripted movie, we’d put her at the final table of the Main Event against eight of her mentors, maybe heads-up against Gold for the title. But there is no script here. The end result of the ALL IN Magazine Project is unwritten. It will be up to Jayde, her teachers, and the cards to decide if she can continue to turn extraordinary opportunity into extraordinary success.