My ex-daughter in law plays professional poker, and there are a lot of cultural similarities with pool. Here are some comments she made a while back on the experience of being a female playing poker:
Sexism in action: A decidedly un-fun experience
So, finally, the meat of the issue: Does the manner in which women are treated in poker rooms make them feel uncomfortable or unwelcome? Here, I feel a twinge of anxiety, because I have to acknowledge that — other than the important observation that only 5 percent of poker players are female — I don’t have a trove of data to support my belief that it does. There are no exit polls in casinos. What I do have is my own experience, and the reported experiences of many other female pros I know. And while there is some vanishingly small chance we are all outliers, extreme misogyny-magnets, the degree of correlation between our experiences gives me a high level of confidence that our experiences are well within the bounds of normalcy.
I came to poker at the tail end of more than a decade of surviving, and frankly thriving, in male-dominated fields. I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biochemistry and a minor in math. I ran a daily newspaper with a nearly all-male editorial staff. I went on to law school, where I headed the technology law journal. Until I left for poker, I worked at a law firm where approximately 90 percent of the attorneys were men. What I’m trying very hard, maybe obnoxiously hard, to signal is that I’m not a delicate naif who has been coddled from birth by the sisterhood. I can take a joke. I can take a compliment. But the amount of bullshit I contend with while playing poker — the incessance, the variety, the sheer volume of it — is totally exhausting.
These days, I primarily play relatively high-stakes cash (5/10 and higher), where there’s less small talk and fewer stone-cold idiots. Despite that, in an average session I probably receive at least 10 comments, ranging from innocuous to outrageous, that call attention to my gender. With experience, I’ve figured out ways to respond effectively to most categories of comments from most categories of men, in much the same way a seasoned player can respond almost intuitively to particular actions by certain types of opponents, but the routine never ceases to be taxing. On good days, it exerts a slow drain on my mental resources. On bad ones, I still have to pick up to keep myself from tilting from frustration and fatigue. If I were not a serious competitor playing to make money, but instead an amateur playing to have some fun, I would not be back; the experience is emphatically not fun.
And the problem is almost indescribably more severe as you move down in stakes. In a recent session, I sat in a 2/5 game for about an hour while waiting for a seat, and the campaign of minor indignities was tilting enough that I eventually opted to hover in the high-limit area instead of playing. One man peppered me with questions like “what does a woman like you do when not playing poker?” and grabbed my arm repeatedly to get my attention, despite my swift recoil. Another nicknamed me “sweetheart” and stared me down, grinning, in every pot, chuckling as he announced he was “scared.” Another tried to cajole me into promising I would “beat them up” when I was called for “the big boy’s game” (and later teetered over to 5/10, beer in hand, to press his sweaty palm into mine for no apparent reason — twice).
Believe us: Sexism is a real problem
I have heard some male pros — I make no claim about their representativeness — take the position that this kind of behavior is innocuous, on the theory that it’s flattering or benign or exploitable. It can be all of those things in certain contexts. But by and large, it is instead irritating or unnerving or embarrassing. And it sends women a consistent signal that they are alien objects of curiosity rather than people who belong at a poker table. If the poker community wants more women to join the game — in other words, if it wants droves of inexperienced players with pristine bankrolls to sit down at the table — the first step is to listen to current female players when they say the environment in most card rooms is a problem. If we diehard enthusiasts are exasperated, try to imagine how women ambivalent about poker likely feel. Your livelihood depends on it.
Cate Hall
Cate Hall is a professional poker player based in Washington DC. Follow her on Twitter: @catehall.
