Poker’s Battle of the Sexes
The Game Show Network’s premier poker show, Poker Royale, attempted to stand out among a glut of poker programs by arranging the games around certain themes. They’ve done “Young Bloods,” where the only players were below the age of thirty. Their first such gimmick, run in 2004, and still being rerun on the network, was the “Battle of the Sexes,” where they tried to find out who was really the superior gender. It was mostly all in good fun, and the male contestants, which included WSOP Main Event champions Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer were ultimately taken down by Poker Pro Kathy Liebert.
Liebert is an incredible poker player, there’s no question about that. She’s one of a handful of female poker pros with over a million dollars in tournament winnings, and she’s got a listing of finishes over the past decade that almost any poker player, regardless of gender, would be envious of. She’s the second-place tournament money winning among women; only Annie Duke has more. But when you factor men into the equation, she’s thirty-eighth on the list. Annie Duke, the most successful female tournament player of all time, is ranked thirty-fifth.
Why is that the top thirty-four money winners are all men? The question that Poker Royale’s “Battle of the Sexes” set out to answer is really an open one: is there a difference in the poker-playing ability of men and women? The results of GSN’s battle notwithstanding, poker has historically been thought of as a game for men: from the image of five-card draw being played by grizzled dirty cowboys in wild west saloons to today, when men “have the guys over” to drink beer, watch football and gather around the table for a round of poker. Even the old guard of poker as we know it today is a line-up of men’s men: Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, Jack Straus, Johnny Moss, and the list goes on. It might not be a surprise that early tournaments were played almost exclusively by men. This most recent explosion in poker’s popularity has started bringing more women than ever to the game, but it still seems like there might be a lingering sense that this game is supposed to be just for guys. It isn’t too tricky to find women-only events. The World Series of Poker has a bracelet that guys can’t take a crack at, and the World Poker Tour had a ladies’ night tournament as well. The question is whether or not the folks in charge are organizing those events because they don’t think the ladies can keep up with the guys, most of the time.
That may have been the case, at one time. Amarillo Slim, one of the greatest poker players of all time, has been recorded as saying several unflattering things about the prospect holding their own against men in the poker room. Whether or not he actually said those things and whether or not he still believes him, it’s representative of the old mentality about how guys and gals play poker, which can be hard to get away from, even for some female poker players.
Shirley Rosario, who runs the popular website www.poker-babes.com, observes that the women poker players she plays against “do not have as much gamble in their game” and she’ll usually change seats if she finds herself at a table with mostly women. It seems to me that the way Rosario describes her general experience playing against women sounds a lot like the general feeling you get when you play against inexperienced players.
Now I’m not saying that women are just picking up the game of poker like it’s been lying around for fifty years and they didn’t notice. Most female poker pros started playing when they were very young, and there were female champs as far back as the 80s, such as Barbara Enright, who has three wins, the most WSOP bracelets of any woman player. But the disparity among numbers of men and women at the highest levels of the game has been gradually shrinking. There are more new female poker players who are looking to compete with men than ever before, and that’s going to translate into more inexperienced female players at the level of the average casino poker table.
In her autobiography, Annie Duke talks about how she stopped playing in women’s only events. She said, “quite rightly I believe, that poker is a game in which men and women are really on a level playing field. You can talk about how men might be, on average, taller or faster than your average woman, but whatever you take the differences in gender to be, they don’t come into play at the poker table.” Duke proved that point herself when she was invited to the 2004 Tournament of Champions, squaring off against nine other legends of the game, including her own brother, Howard Lederer. She outlasted that year’s champion, Greg Raymer, along with Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, Chip Reese, Daniel Negreanu, T.J. Cloutier, and Johnny Chan, who constitute an absolute A-list of poker pros. She beat them all to take home a WSOP bracelet and a cool two million dollars.
I’d like to close with a little story about my older sister, who’s just as good at poker as anyone. She showed up at a poker night with a few of her friends, and the regulars were surprised to see a girl show up at their game. They consulted for a few minutes and eventually decided that the buy-in that night was going to be twice what it normally would be, up to forty dollars from twenty. They figured that my sister was going to be dead money, and they didn’t want her coming back next week, so they figured they’d get as much out of her as they could.
Little did they know, my sister is a fierce competitor who doesn’t like to be taken lightly because of her gender. She’s also been playing poker since before the age of ten, and on top of that, she spent several years regularly hustling gullible patrons at the billiards bar she where she worked. Well, three or four hours of solid poker later, my sister walked out of that house several hundred dollars richer, leaving quite a few stunned and disappointed poker-playing guys behind her.
Maybe someday, when poker has finally successfully shaken off its image as being a game for the guys, that championship table won’t just have somebody there playing as “the woman at the table,” but as “one of the people at the table.”
Liebert is an incredible poker player, there’s no question about that. She’s one of a handful of female poker pros with over a million dollars in tournament winnings, and she’s got a listing of finishes over the past decade that almost any poker player, regardless of gender, would be envious of. She’s the second-place tournament money winning among women; only Annie Duke has more. But when you factor men into the equation, she’s thirty-eighth on the list. Annie Duke, the most successful female tournament player of all time, is ranked thirty-fifth.
Why is that the top thirty-four money winners are all men? The question that Poker Royale’s “Battle of the Sexes” set out to answer is really an open one: is there a difference in the poker-playing ability of men and women? The results of GSN’s battle notwithstanding, poker has historically been thought of as a game for men: from the image of five-card draw being played by grizzled dirty cowboys in wild west saloons to today, when men “have the guys over” to drink beer, watch football and gather around the table for a round of poker. Even the old guard of poker as we know it today is a line-up of men’s men: Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, Jack Straus, Johnny Moss, and the list goes on. It might not be a surprise that early tournaments were played almost exclusively by men. This most recent explosion in poker’s popularity has started bringing more women than ever to the game, but it still seems like there might be a lingering sense that this game is supposed to be just for guys. It isn’t too tricky to find women-only events. The World Series of Poker has a bracelet that guys can’t take a crack at, and the World Poker Tour had a ladies’ night tournament as well. The question is whether or not the folks in charge are organizing those events because they don’t think the ladies can keep up with the guys, most of the time.
That may have been the case, at one time. Amarillo Slim, one of the greatest poker players of all time, has been recorded as saying several unflattering things about the prospect holding their own against men in the poker room. Whether or not he actually said those things and whether or not he still believes him, it’s representative of the old mentality about how guys and gals play poker, which can be hard to get away from, even for some female poker players.
Shirley Rosario, who runs the popular website www.poker-babes.com, observes that the women poker players she plays against “do not have as much gamble in their game” and she’ll usually change seats if she finds herself at a table with mostly women. It seems to me that the way Rosario describes her general experience playing against women sounds a lot like the general feeling you get when you play against inexperienced players.
Now I’m not saying that women are just picking up the game of poker like it’s been lying around for fifty years and they didn’t notice. Most female poker pros started playing when they were very young, and there were female champs as far back as the 80s, such as Barbara Enright, who has three wins, the most WSOP bracelets of any woman player. But the disparity among numbers of men and women at the highest levels of the game has been gradually shrinking. There are more new female poker players who are looking to compete with men than ever before, and that’s going to translate into more inexperienced female players at the level of the average casino poker table.
In her autobiography, Annie Duke talks about how she stopped playing in women’s only events. She said, “quite rightly I believe, that poker is a game in which men and women are really on a level playing field. You can talk about how men might be, on average, taller or faster than your average woman, but whatever you take the differences in gender to be, they don’t come into play at the poker table.” Duke proved that point herself when she was invited to the 2004 Tournament of Champions, squaring off against nine other legends of the game, including her own brother, Howard Lederer. She outlasted that year’s champion, Greg Raymer, along with Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey, Chip Reese, Daniel Negreanu, T.J. Cloutier, and Johnny Chan, who constitute an absolute A-list of poker pros. She beat them all to take home a WSOP bracelet and a cool two million dollars.
I’d like to close with a little story about my older sister, who’s just as good at poker as anyone. She showed up at a poker night with a few of her friends, and the regulars were surprised to see a girl show up at their game. They consulted for a few minutes and eventually decided that the buy-in that night was going to be twice what it normally would be, up to forty dollars from twenty. They figured that my sister was going to be dead money, and they didn’t want her coming back next week, so they figured they’d get as much out of her as they could.
Little did they know, my sister is a fierce competitor who doesn’t like to be taken lightly because of her gender. She’s also been playing poker since before the age of ten, and on top of that, she spent several years regularly hustling gullible patrons at the billiards bar she where she worked. Well, three or four hours of solid poker later, my sister walked out of that house several hundred dollars richer, leaving quite a few stunned and disappointed poker-playing guys behind her.
Maybe someday, when poker has finally successfully shaken off its image as being a game for the guys, that championship table won’t just have somebody there playing as “the woman at the table,” but as “one of the people at the table.”
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