On Friday, September 4, the lights come up inside PokerGO Studio in Las Vegas and a room full of people accustomed to being looked at will sit down and try to read one another instead. Lika O will be among them, and this time she has no interest in being the spectacle. The award-winning singer, actress and producer returns to the Celebrity Poker Tour for Invitational XIII with a single stated ambition, and it is not a viral moment. It is the win.
The field is the deepest the tour has assembled this season. Caitlyn Jenner headlines, making her CPT debut alongside her son Brandon Jenner, in a lineup that also includes Ray J, Tana Mongeau, NBA guard Norman Powell, Bryce Hall, Josh Gordon, former UFC bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling, India Love and Suede Brooks. Cards go in the air at 6 p.m. local time, streamed live on the Celebrity Poker Tour’s YouTube channel, where a franchise that launched in 2023 has settled into its own strange, watchable rhythm across three seasons. Co-founder Blake Wynn has described the game as a canvas for entertainment, and the tour he founded alongside Pullard keeps proving the point: a table where an Olympic gold medalist, an R&B veteran and a pop star can all be equally out of their depth is better television than any of them alone.
Lika’s first appearance came at Invitational XII in May, and it produced a subplot nobody had scripted. Ray J spent much of the broadcast visibly taken with her, flirting openly across the felt before escalating to a playful on-camera proposal. It was the kind of moment that travels: clipped, reposted, argued over for a week. It was also, from where Lika sits now, a distraction from the part she actually cared about.
Because here is the detail that reframes the whole story. When Fliff, the tour’s presenting sponsor, published its odds board for Invitational XII, Lika O opened at +4000, level with Le’Veon Bell and Miesha Tate and shorter than Ray J at +5000. Now, ahead of Invitational XIII, her odds have shortened to +2000. The market, in other words, is giving her a considerably stronger chance this time around. She simply has to prove it right at the table.
The competitive instinct is not new. It has only found a new table. Established in Russian music and television before she was out of her twenties, Lika moved to the United States in 2006 and built a career through sheer accumulation: more than ten national pageant titles, then a decade running Miss Russian LA, the competition she founded in 2012 and produced into a televised institution. The pivot into music came during lockdown, and what followed has been relentlessly cinematic, culminating in “Shoot First,” a million-dollar short film and music video hybrid shot at Resorts World Las Vegas, and an audience of over 3 million on Instagram she assembled without a label handing it to her.
That history matters at this particular table. The Celebrity Poker Tour has a documented habit of being won by the people nobody priced up: across its first season, women took two thirds of the titles, among them poker professional Maria Ho and Princess Love, who became the first Black woman to win a CPT event. Suede Brooks, back in the field on Friday, took Game Night VI in May 2025. The tour’s own history argues against the assumption Lika is walking in to correct.
She has said very little in advance, which is its own kind of tell. Lika is accustomed to commanding a room, but on Friday, applause is not what she is after. She is playing for the belt.