Female Poker

Poker: The Female Factor

One out of every six new players is female. Here are the main reasons why women are taking up online poker:

• Poker is appearing in the media more. The game now appears on TV, with high-profile tournaments that show how players can be sneaky and bluff one another. TV and movies also show the game in a glamorous and exciting way.
• There are more female professional poker players making good money from the game. With the success of the women listed in the Women’s Poker Hall of Fame there are now some great role models for women to emulate.
• Online poker rooms are safe, anonymous and friendly, and often moderated by women. Old style casinos were intimidating to go into, but the new online poker rooms hold no barriers to women.
• Online poker supports new players with great poker schools, tips, tutorials and extensive guidelines on how to play the game well. Also, because you are anonymous, you don’t have to worry about making a fool of yourself while you are still learning!
• You can play for fun on the play tables or for small stakes. People are sometimes frightened that they might get into a game where the stakes just keep rising. But fixed cost (limit) games ensure that women know exactly what they are betting and how much they stand to win or lose.

It can only be a matter of time before we have the first-ever female winner of the World Series of Poker

Where this piece stands now. It was written while the shift it describes was still a surprise to the people running cardrooms, and its reasoning holds up better than most of the period's writing on the subject. The argument is not that women were drawn to poker by a change in the game; it is that the online table removed the parts of the experience that had nothing to do with poker — the room, the walk to the table, and an audience for every beginner's mistake.

Two details in it are worth separating from the optimism. The first is that anonymity cuts in a particular direction: online, a player is read through betting patterns rather than appearance, which takes away both the intimidation and a tell that some players had learned to use. The second is the point about fixed-limit games, which is practical rather than social — a structure with a known cost per round is the honest way to find out whether you enjoy a game, and the column was right to recommend it to anybody arriving new, not only to the readers it was addressing here. The Women's Poker Hall of Fame it points to was then the only visible set of role models the game offered.