Female players - still a minority?

As the number of people whose interest in poker has been piqued by television coverage or word of mouth has grown, the number of women taking up the game either socially (for a bit of competitive fun once in a while) or more seriously (professionally or semi-professionally) has, naturally, grown with it. As far as an established female presence on the international scene goes, you need only to watch the WPT videos, or stand behind the highest limit cash games in Las Vegas to see the likes of Jennifer Harman, Annie Duke, Lucy Rokach and Kathy Liebert taking a slice of the top professionals on a regular basis. But it is also interesting to look at the lower limit female players, the newer recruits, so to speak, to get a general idea of whether the traditionally male-dominated game is actually heading towards becoming more balanced, and women regarded less as occasional exceptions.

No one would deny that the women who have not only made big money finishes, but consistently hover around the top of their field, are great players. But you’d be surprised how often male players admit to a gender bias if their female opponent is not well-known. It’s almost a cliché to be an adequate female player and use the negative image (tight, weak, unlikely to bluff) to one’s advantage. I have heard many women of differing actual ability say things like this, but I reckon that a male player who makes the same mistake over and over again, having had proof that their female opponent is canny, is probably not paying enough attention for this kind of ‘bluff’ to be any good anyway. Good players of either sex know that forming an inflexible opinion of an opponent without any evidence of how they play is a recipe for disaster.

Being a female player myself, albeit of a more lowly variety, I was initially surprised by how strongly other women, relatively new to the game, felt about being unfairly (or inaccurately) categorised by others at the table. It seems odd to be both annoyed at being classed as weaker than one is, and also to be delighted at the prospect of playing off others’ misconceptions. This is the poker player dichotomy – ego and disguise of ability. If you can’t resist threading and twirling your chips with expert ease, your ‘my first live game’ line is unlikely to wash. So for the relatively unknown female player who wants to play live, it is a matter of not being terribly bothered what people think of you personally, while being aware of a potentially advantageous table image. Of course, there is always a time limit on the latter, as players who do well are remembered, especially if it’s a bit of a surprise.

So this middle category of non-famous, live-playing women is expanding, but nowhere near as fast as I would have predicted a year ago. As a woman in a casino, you will still be outnumbered more than twenty to one almost anywhere you go, and this kind of environment just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Even with the thickest skin and strongest desire to play, there is something off-putting to a lot of women about sitting indoors through the weekends and evenings with a bunch of guys playing cards for money. Playing poker all the time has a limiting if not destructive effect on social and home life for a lot of people. It just doesn’t appeal enough to get them travelling around the festivals, which would end up being done alone a lot of the time, or sitting through the long nights working on their cash game. This is true of men as well as women, but the crucial difference is the number of new players of each sex showing up to play on a given day.

Working as a dealer in the Gutshot Club in London, I would sign up maybe 30 new members on a busy day; 28 of them would be men. Perhaps half of them might never be seen again, but more always showed up to take their place the next week. There just aren’t as many women trying it that first time, and if that continues to be the case, there won’t be any redressing of the balance.

Partly to blame for the low numbers of women showing up at card rooms, and mainly to thank for their starting to play more regularly, is the internet. Playing anonymously from the comfort of one’s bedroom is in many ways preferable to playing live. Many more hands per hour are played, and it is possible to clock up months’ worth of experience in a much shorter time. I know more than one mother with young children who fits in making a decent living online around the unpredictable schedule babies create. She might be yet another ‘TeddyKGB’ online, doing very well, but that doesn’t mean that anyone will have heard of her or even that she’ll play live more than a handful of times per year.

Statistics show that women make up nearly a third of all online players and are the fastest growing category. The boom in online play may have been paralleled by a rise in card room attendance, but there is still a great discrepancy between the interest shown in playing by women, and their visibility amidst the crowds of men who turn up to play with real cards and chips. I reckon that it is still only a matter of time before women ‘trained’ on the internet give playing live a try in much greater numbers (just look at the turnout for Women’s Tournaments this year worldwide), but the same factors of male dominance and difficulty of finding time to commute to live games are still putting them off.