Women and Poker..Where are They?

After reading the article below in the NY Times this morning I have to admit that i'm somewhat shocked. I thought there was a whole lot more women playing poker these days. These figures sound like something you would have heard in the late 1800s not 2005! With women holding prominent positions all over the world, why aren't more playing poker? There are huge amounts of money to be won every day and women are prime candidates to win this money.

A lot of men don't take women too seriously when they sit down at the table to play some texas holdem which should be easy pickin's for women. My previous experiences playing with women is they are harder to read.

Now I'm not saying they put on a better "poker face" but as we all know their train of thought changes every few seconds which leads to unpredictabilty.....or is that just my wife?? My wife can call all-in while talking on the phone AND yelling at the kids. Hell, I dont ever know what she's thinking about anything, much less what kind of hand she is holding! Ladies...Where are you? You can't let a bunch of big mouthed men keep you from playing the game. C'mon out and take my money

By JAMES McMANUS

Published: July 23, 2005
The winner of every World Series event this year was a man, as were all nine final tablists in the championship. So are the 69 highest-ranked tournament players. Jennifer Harman is No. 70, Cyndy Violette No. 72, Annie Duke No. 374. Harman, Violette and Duke have all won bracelets, and Harman more than holds her own every night in the Bellagio's famous mixed game, which requires mastering a dizzying variety of poker forms and putting about $100,000 in action.


These three and a few dozen other women make handsome livings at poker. Even so, a woman has yet to win the main event at the World Series. In 36 years, only Barbara Enright, who finished fifth in 1995, has even made the final table. Nor has a woman won a single World Poker Tour championship.

One reason is that very few women choose to compete in the major events, which cost between $5,000 and $25,000 to enter. Of the 5,619 players in the $10,000 World Series finale, only 202 (3.6 percent) were women. You've got to be in it to win it.

The game played in almost every major tournament is no-limit Texas Hold'em, the form that most consistently rewards an aggressive approach. The leverage it provides to win pots without the best hand gives forceful risk-takers a significant edge. These "table captains" and "bullies" will raise (or call a raise) before the flop with just about any two cards, aiming to bust the conservative "rocks" - male or female - who patiently wait for big pairs. Even when the flop misses the bully's hand, he often proceeds on the assumption that it missed the rock's, too, and attacks with a sizable bet. This is how young guns like John Phan and Phil Ivey have been dominating big-money tournaments.

John Tierney, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, recently reported on the biological aspect of competitiveness. In a University of Pittsburgh study, women did as well as men, both individually and on four-member teams, in a math game that paid $2 per correct answer. But when offered the chance to either consolidate their profits or risk them in a tournament with much more at stake, most women declined to compete, even the ones who had previously done best in the game. Most men chose to enter the tournament, even those who had fared poorly earlier.

"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," one researcher concluded. "The men who weren't good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won."

Tierney, in a follow-up column, quoted the anthropologist Helen Fisher as saying, "Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy, because those males get more reproductive opportunities." And as a result, "Women don't get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top," Fisher said.

This anticompetitive bias might be even stronger in no-limit tournaments, because money not only flows to the top of a pyramid of risk-takers but is also the game's very language. (Balancing this bias, perhaps, is that poker also rewards patience and what is often called women's intuition, the empathetic ability to read what others are thinking or feeling.)

There are plenty of aggressively competitive women, of course, in poker and other arenas, as well as patient, intuitive men. But the fact that men produce about 25 times as much testosterone, a hormone linked to both stamina and competitiveness, probably makes it easier for them to stay aggressive for the week or so it takes to win a major no-limit event.

Age is also a factor. Testy young males not only love tournament action, but also have enough time for it. As a group they may have fewer family responsibilities than women, or than men over, say, 35. Young men might also be better able to cope with the physical toll of traveling from event to event.

Danica Patrick, Annika Sorenstam, Michelle Wie and others are proving that women can compete against men in some physical sports. Pokeristas are closer to achieving full parity and should get even closer as reinforcements arrive. According to EmpirePoker.com, women made up only 4 percent of its players in 2003, but 20 percent two years later. Anxiety about competing is presumably less of a factor in online games, even though intuition is thwarted. But as women learn the game in small-buy-in virtual tournaments, more might be willing to risk part of their bankroll in lucrative on-land events.

Harman, for one, is impatient. She recently told me that many women still seem intimidated by men at the table. After granting that women have made progress over the last decade, she added, "At this rate it'll be a couple hundred years before we're winning half the events."

Here's hoping she'll prove to have been unduly pessimistic.