Vanessa Rousso, Wellington High's valedictorian in 2001, just keeps adding to her fame.

A photo of her in a bikini appears in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition that just hit newsstands.

UPDATED ON FRIDAY: I got my magazine and it's a two-page spread, with the headline "Swimming with the Sharks." Vanessa is wearing a short top, not a bikini top. And bikini briefs while standing in thigh-high water, with two sharks' fins photoshopped in the water. (Personally, it's a welcome contrast to the rest of this year's SI, which seems to center on women NOT wearing suits -- instead draping them over their shoulders, or slightly tugging them off of their body, or wearing half of them.) Also, a one-page Q-and-A with Vanessa.

"It was a great opportunity for poker in general and for me in particular," said Rousso, who was in Jupiter this week to visit family before heading out to Los Angeles for her next tournament. "You could say it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Rousso's sponsor, PokerStars.net, pitched the idea of a woman in poker being among the models. Rousso, 26, has long blonde hair, a quick smile and is an automatic mention on men-admiring-women web sites, such as PokerHotties.org.

She went to the Bahamas for a photo shoot conducted by SI on Jan. 4, but rather than appear in the editorial portion of the magazine, she is part of a PokerStars-sponsored "custom content" piece, which the online poker room paid for. In other words, it's advertorial copy.

She loosens up significantly from her table appearance, which includes a hat, sunglasses, earphones and shirts that go all the way up to her Adam's apple.

"But it was the opportunity to try something new, and I think it was done very tastefully," she said Wednesday, after seeing a copy of the magazine.

In recent years, she has been photographed for Maxim magazine, taught poker to Forbes magazine's 100 Most Powerful Women and written articles on game theory for American Poker Player magazine.

She attended law school briefly at the University of Miami after graduating from Duke in 2.5 years, and verbalizes poker strategy so well that the World Poker Tour Boot Camp often invites her as a guest instructor. She also has her own poker instruction course coming to South Florida soon, she said.

The SI swimsuit issue sells about 4.5 million copies, compared to the weekly's usual 3.1 million.