Comedians from Kevin Hart to David Cross to Ray Romano have been known to get in on the action at the poker table throughout the years. But Caitlin Comeskey is not the type to simply jump in an occasional celebrity tournament.
As a struggling actress in Los Angeles, Comeskey would hop into the casinos in between auditions to play cards. She ultimately decided to combine her passions, expanding into comedy and poker content on YouTube and social media.
While she brings the laughs, Comeskey has also put up some results, including a runner-up finish in the PokerStars Open Philadelphia series last April. The native Texan also has a couple of big second-place showings at the Lodge in the Monthly Monster. In 2024, she won a RunGood Poker Series ring in Tunica, and then a month later she took down the ladies event on the WPT Voyage cruise. The PokerStars ambassador has also appeared on PokerGO’s No Gamble, No Future.
Comeskey recently spoke with the crew at the Table 1 podcast about how she found her way to poker. Check out the highlights below, or watch or listen to the entire episode below or on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or any podcast app.
Art Parmann: If we’re about making poker fun again, you are about making poker funny again. I’ve been following you since 2022 when you had that big breakout video about the ‘jack-four ordeal.’ (A viral sketch about the infamous Robbi Jade Lew-Garrett Adelstein hand in 2022.)
Caitlin Comeskey: Nice to meet you! I got to meet Justin last year when we played on No Gamble, No Future…
Justin Young: …which was a blast. I was telling Art I was so intimidated because I knew how funny you were and I knew how funny Stapes (Joe Stapleton) was. I’m usually the funny one. I was like, ‘Am I going to be able to say any words?’ You guys were gracious allowing me to make a joke here and there.
Caitlin Comeskey: I think we might have been a little bit too funny on that stream because they couldn’t use a lot of the footage. I think we only got like one episode out of it – RIP those eight hours of play. Did you watch our episode?
Justin Young: Yes, I did.
Caitlin Comeskey: How did I do? I never go back and watch live streams. It gives me the biggest cringe to watch myself on camera. In performance stuff and sketches I’m editing, obviously I look at my face a lot. But when it’s somebody else editing it and color correcting it, I have no control over it, both creatively and then also I’m playing poker and being myself in front of other people publicly… I can’t.
Justin Young: Were you more nervous about your actual poker play or your table presence?
Caitlin Comeskey: My behavior, always my behavior. (laughing)
Justin Young: Well, in that case, I thought you passed with flying colors.
Where’d you grow up and how did you get into gambling?
Caitlin Comeskey: I grew up in Dallas, Texas, in Plano, the northeast area of Texas. I went to a religious school, Christian fundamentalist, Baptist, kindergarten through senior year with the same group of people. But my home life wasn’t religious, we very rarely went to church. We never prayed at meals so it was like, what do the kids say? Six, seven.
Art Parmann: That’s not how you use that.
Justin Young: Well, no one knows what it means. She could be spot on. (all laughing) How was religion part of your life then growing up?
Caitlin Comeskey: Most of the time, I [played] devil’s advocate, and was the questioning kid in the group. Towards my senior year, I started to drink the Kool-Aid a little bit and got more into it, to the point where I arrived in New York City as a freshman at NYU listening to Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and reading my Bible and teaching Sunday school. But then I was in acting school and around all different types of people and I was like, ‘Actually, that’s lame as hell.’
Art Parmann: How’d you get from Dallas to New York City?
Caitlin Comeskey: I had really good grades and I got an early admittance to NYU. I wanted musical theater at the time. I always sang, and musical theater summer camp were some of the happiest memories of my childhood. I auditioned for a bunch of programs. NYU was just the best program I got into.
Justin Young: Do you remember what you sent in to NYU (to get accepted)?
Caitlin Comeskey: Oh, I remember. It was an in-person audition. I went to New York and I auditioned for a bunch of different schools. I auditioned for Juilliard, which was my dream. But they only accept about 16 acting students a year, and they get 5,000 auditions, 4,000 of which are probably 18-year-old white girls with brown hair. They are putting together a company, so they need different types of people.
So, I was drawing pretty dead with Juilliard. But when I auditioned for NYU, I did a Harper monologue from Angels in America, who’s like this pilled-out housewife. (A mentally unstable woman who hallucinates because of taking large amounts of Valium.)
Comeskey then discussed moving to L.A., struggling as an actress and getting into comedy, while also mixing in poker at the Hustler Casino.
Justin Young: I feel like you’re young enough that I can ask this, how old are you?
Caitlin Comeskey: 36, but I look 27 right? (laughing) I’ve been filming so much content over the last month, I’ve done three stops in a row, so I’ve been seeing my face a lot and I think it might be injector time – there are so many valleys on my forehead. I’m like, ‘whoa.’
Justin Young: Or you could just grow a beard and wear a hat.
Caitlin Comeskey: I need to do something, a hat, a paper bag, anything.
Justin Young: I’d save that for sex. (laughing)
Caitlin Comeskey: How dare you! (laughing) I’m 85% sure my husband is still attracted to me.
Art Parmann: I guess you were in high school during the Moneymaker boom. When did poker come along for you?
Caitlin Comeskey: My dad taught me how to play super young. I was 10 or 11… poker wasn’t legal in Texas back then. I was watching the ESPN episodes with my dad and my brother. My dad started taking my older brother to underground games when he was still in high school. My brother was always so cool. He was a jock on the basketball team. He dated older girls in high school.
I was not that. I was the theater girl, and so I always was annoyed that my dad was willing to take my brother and not me. I developed this chip on my shoulder about it.
When I was 21 I played home games with my actor friends when we all moved out to [California] together. Then the first club I ever started playing in regularly was the Hustler when I was living on the west side of Los Angeles.
I’d go play $1-$3. I’d show up with $300 and if I lost it, I went home. I’d go to Hawaiian Gardens, the Bike, and Commerce occasionally, but my favorite was always the Hustler. I don’t know why. I guess I just liked the purple and yellow vibes, the aesthetics of it. I’m very shallow.
After college, I toured as a comedian in Best Coast Burlesque. I would always play on my days off. I’m sure I was a losing player overall, I didn’t really track it.
I didn’t start winning and taking it seriously until 2018 when I moved back to Texas and they had opened legal cardrooms. The games were super soft, and I had a lot of luck right away making money. That’s when I quit my job in a hotel and started focusing on that.
Justin Young: So when you moved out to L.A., what was the goal?
Caitlin Comeskey: I wanted to be an A-list actress, of course. I wanted to be the next Jessica Chastain. When I was at NYU, I didn’t join an improv team or a comedy troupe. I took myself very seriously as a dramatic actress, and poured my whole heart into my training.
I did really well. I was a star student within my acting conservatory. But when I got to L.A., they said, ‘Your type is like a 40-year-old woman, and you’re not going to get work as a young person. You have to age into your type,’ which was just so hard to hear at 22.
I think it’s something a lot of young women get when they’re going through that process, and it’s a bummer. But they were right. I had a really hard time booking work in my early 20s as an actress, and it’s a really hard culture.
The feedback you keep getting is, ‘if you want to make it in L.A., you have to make your own content. You have to make your own work.’ So, I started making YouTube videos, little sketches here and there. I started really early. In 2012 was when I started first making content shorts and experimenting with short-form video and things like that.
Around this time is when I started doing stand-up. I remember the first short-form video I ever made was called ‘The Vegeholic.’ I basically played a super drunk person just shoving fistfuls of spinach into my mouth while my husband’s like, ‘Please stop. Please stop.’
Justin Young: Did you end up booking anything of note?
Caitlin Comeskey: One of the coolest things I booked was as featured background in an Elijah Wood short film. He was playing, funny enough, a stand-up comedian. I remember Elijah was super cool. We had a lot of downtime on set, and he’s a cigarette smoker. I was a cigarette smoker at the time, and I remember I had cigarettes on me, but I asked to bum a cigarette so I could have a conversation with him.
Justin Young: You mentioned your husband earlier. Did you meet him out there?
Caitlin Comeskey: I met him in Texas playing cash poker in Killeen. There’s some really fun games in Killeen. Back then, a late friend of ours had a card club, and I met him playing $5-$10-$25.
He’s a recreational player. He’s in sales and just plays on the side, but he was in a relationship back then. He wasn’t really on my radar as a romantic interest. We became friends and then went on our first date and just had an immediate connection.
The conversation later moved into discussion of Comeskey’s time in burlesque and how it helped her career.
Caitlin Comeskey: I worked with a brand called Pinups On Tour, and we put on burlesque shows. We mostly did military venues. Our show was free for veterans and military to attend, so it was like an Americana USO, but saucier, more edgy.
I’d open the set with a welcome comedy song that I wrote, and then do 10 minutes of stand-up. I was on the stage in between the performers. I learned how to do crowd work, and got so much more time as a stand-up than I would have if I was just grinding open mics, so that was super cool. Then when I went back to L.A., I would host shows at Flappers in Burbank and West Side Comedy Theater in Santa Monica, and had a little luck there.
Justin Young: Did you audition to be the comedy relief?
Caitlin Comeskey: One of my closest friends, Julia, did burlesque at the time. We met doing a terrible Shakespeare production in downtown Los Angeles. It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in India and I was one of the fairies. I was very thin and very fit at the time, so I was just a stage ornament. I would be in a dancer pose for 10 minutes while Titania is arguing on stage.
They always needed comedians during burlesque shows. My friend knew I was trying stand-up and doing open mics and different clubs. She was like, ‘Hey, you want to come do a burlesque show?’
I remember when I first went to burlesque shows, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, these girls are taking their clothes off.’ With my background, I was just very aghast. But over time, it all of a sudden became, ‘Hey, do you want to try it out?’ and I was up there in a wig.
’Welcome to the stage, Missy Farquhar! And she’s singing a song!’ That’s how that came about. When Julia formed her own troupe and decided to put on her producer hat, she was like, ‘Do you want to host these shows?’ I started going on the road with her. It was so much stage time, which was invaluable.
Follow Comeskey on Twitter and Instagram @CaitlinComeskey, and check out her YouTube channel @CaitlinTexasPoker. You can also listen to her on the Aceholes Podcast, available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
About The Table 1 Podcast
Hosted by high-stakes poker pros Art Parmann and Justin Young, the Table 1 Podcast is on a mission to make poker fun again. Tune in to see world-class pros talk poker, gambling, and all manner of life experiences on and off the felt. Visit the website for the podcast, newsletter, or even to get in the game. ♠
- Photos – Card Player and PokerStars