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"Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
Luckily, this is not difficult."
-- Charlotte Whitton
Several years ago I wrote an article on
Poker Profits and Sexual Politics. Since then, the
poker landscape has changed drastically and so has the number of female poker players who regularly enjoy playing the game. Women are
still a minority, but the percentage of players who are women has risen quite a lot.
What hasn't changed so much is the ability to make money from gender politics. Even more than before it is important to remember that
as a group women play better poker than men, especially when considering relatively new players.
The main reason there are more men who are top poker players is because more men play poker. That's simple enough. On percentage basis
though, I just don't understand why so many men refuse to see what is also obvious: the average level of play for women players is
higher than the average level of play for men players. The vast majority of tremendously awful players are men. Even more important,
the group of mediocre long-term losers is, IMO, proportionally higher for men. And then even more, novice male players play
dramatically worse, especially online -- in large part because they tend to play higher limits and in bigger games than their
skills merit. In other words, weak male players
are more likely to delude themselves into thinking they can beat bigger/tougher online poker games than women are.
A lousy female player playing $2/4 is a much better player than a lousy male player playing $30/60. You measure poker by the
application of mathematical edge, which means if you bet $10 that you can eat 50 eggs in two minutes, you are a worse bettor than if
you bet $1 that you can eat 50 eggs in two minutes.
Windows - Mac
This is all extreme generalization of course, with a lot of exceptions, but men normally bring all sorts of things to the table that
counteract any possible male-brain-is-more-math-inclined genetic advantages that may or may not exist: they drink more, they smoke
more, they eat more --- and they let their macho egos get in the way of how they play far more. Women win and lose in moderation. Men
go off like rockets and sleep in cars when they lose.
 Sexism is the last refuge
of the insecure, and, the really stupid also. It has been suggested that since men are more aggressive means they are more inclined to
study poker. If only that were true. Instead it seems much more reasonable to blame the innate aggressiveness of the male for how men
throw themselves into poker games blindly, without thought or study or the skill level to succeed. In all life I'm hard pressed to
think of one example where men aren't, on average, more thoughtless and more who-cares-about-consequences than women. And this certainly
carries over to poker.
Misapplied testosterone is the biggest killer of poker players that there is (just like in the rest of life too). Unbridled ego is the
doom of successful players. Sensible people, winning players, find the quickest way around or over walls. They don't try to break them
down with their foreheads.
Sensible aggression is crucial to playing winning poker, but misapplied aggression is one direct path to being a loser.
Since part of poker is non-communication, a joke could be made that since men are better at non-communicating than women, they should make
better players. At the same time though, poker is also a game of communication, and especially deciphering miscommunication. Communicating
the information you want to communicate (including misinformation) while deciphering the miscommunication of opponents is far more important
than "non-communicating" yourself. Poker is a game of deciphering coded and inadvertent communications. I think would Henny Youngman
would agree that women are more natural poker players because, he said, when you look up "lie detector" in the dictionary it says:
see "wife".
For more on the female poker perspective, see Shirley Rosario's
Poker Babes site.
See also Poker Stereotypes
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