Are Women in Poker Underestimated?

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: well, there
is a lot of things to say. Compared to their male counterparts, they definitely
are. Physically, they’re usually smaller and they’re usually better looking on the eyes (sorry guys!) Overall women in professional poker struggle with being under-estimated,
but it might not be such a bad thing. Usually when you’re under-estimated, people expect you to not doo all the well, so if you can surprise them, you can usually take a bigger win. But why do people underestimate females in an intellectual game of
Texasholdem?

While it might sound like a generalisation
(because it is), people usually don’t expect a woman to be deceiving them, and
while some think about the manipulation aspect, some don’t see this until it is
too late.

And as such, this rings true in poker.
Female players might be considered more trustworthy in person. As such, they
are underestimated by the general poker playing community, apart from a certain
few players. Some of them are looked up too as some of the best players in the
game, but the average female poker player might be under-estimated because of
their gender.

Women
are generally targeted players

Poker players tend to judge on appearances
meaning that there are often generalisations made. One of these is that women
generally have “tight” pockets, meaning players target them with their bets.
This allows something of a slow bleed out of a player’s pockets.

However, this doesn’t mean that all women
are the same, but there is not plenty of female players that compete in the
big, main event style tournaments. In 2011, female players made up just 3.5% of
the main event field of players. Women are
severely underrepresented in these big tournaments, despite the small successes
of some players, which will bring me to the next point.

Women
are severely underrepresented

As mentioned in the statistic above, there
are not heaps of female poker players that are in the highest rankings. There
could be considered maybe 2-5 out of the top 500 players in some
people’s minds. From this point, when more and more female players are joining
the field, it is becoming a more saturated field with some of the best female
players making a name for them self. And this can mean more female role models
for new players, so this could see a good turnaround.

Moving on from here, each female player can
improve this by competing in the bigger tournaments. If you can go in there and
compete as well as you can possibly do so, you can help improve this statistic.
Just give it a go, and do your best to become the next female role model that
makes poker a woman’s sport as well.

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