sure, gender differences can be interesting in some contexts but I've found there's borderline obsession over them in male-dominated intellectual games like chess and poker. Also the discussion often seems to be a self-fullfilling prophecy as the more people talk about why or how ill-suited women are for poker, the more people treat women coming into the game as though they were weak and the more likely women are to shy away from the game (obviously the strong personalities will rise to the occasion but there could def be some talented ones who never take poker as seriously as a result.)

In other words, I strongly disagree that the *only* reason not to talk about it is out of fear of what you'll find. Talking about gender differences in poker on public forums, etc. can influence reality and make it more like whatever conclusions are most articulate (regardless of whether those are based on rigorous analysis).

Good, then stopping talking about your opinions on this matter because you are influencing my thought process with your articulation with no rigorous analysis to suggest that what you are implying is the truth.

Yea, I mean, I see Venice's point. And I kind of agree...for someone who's experience was mainly made up of online, most of the players are guys. So I could actually understand how Annette could take a default stance that women are bad, simply because the few women she may have come in contact with online were not ones she considered to be good.

I can also relate to this on another level; from meeting a very good online female player this summer, who pretty much has the same feelings regarding female players mainly because she just did not know that there were other winning females who played online poker. This forum and many conversations have changed her mind, I think, and I consider her to be a good friend now. But I think that this may account for much of the default view on women: that they are generally bad because while there are a decent number of "women in poker" who are household names, not many of them are actually good players. So this reduces the perceived skill even more, and makes the "good" woman player even all the more rare. The problem with this is that there are a lot of very strong female players out there who no one knows about, simply because they have not sought the spot light and/or have been happy simply making a living in mid stakes online or in cash games in Vegas/AC.

I guess it just seems very weird to me that an online female player, who obviously knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are good online female players (seeing as how she's one of them), would make such a blanket statement that she had to know would be attacked. Further, she herself is proof that good female players exist; she can't have honestly believed she was the only one. Or could she?

So I guess youth and arrogance do seem like likely candidates for the statement. I also apparently am misapplying the "straw man" issue, but since I'm not sure how I'll simply shut up about it.

maybe annettes jealous because shes not as attractive as the majority of the girls who get attention for looks moreso then poker. she shouldnt be calling out doyle brunson, even though i agree with what shes saying. keep it to yourself young lady!

She is a very good player, but just another out of a few thousand! She IS young and female, and has a total grasp of English (idiom and all) for a Euro! She is/was a perfect person for the Online poker "suits" to hype prior to BF! She is not the first poker player to say outrageous things to elevate his her public status a bit. And it has worked out pretty good! I assume that this is just method for career advancement and we will see/more. She does need to win something big live again in the next year or two, maybe a WPT event, to keep the ball rolling so to speak!

Sadly, I find that it's not that uncommon for strong females in male-dominated fields to think of themselves as exceptions. If Annette believes that women are less talented/apt at poker, wouldn't it make her achievements/skills all the more extraordinary and worthy of accolades and sponsorship?

Wow! I read this whole thread and everyone makes great points here but my issue with her "comment" is that to me, it breeds a very unwelcoming environment for women in poker. It's kind of sad and I realize she's young and immature but any woman who breaks through a ceiling of any kind in a man's world or a boy's club should not spew vitriol at other women. I think as women, we should stick together and cultivate mentorship, benevolence and benefactors for our own. The kind of thinking that Annette is vocalizing is harmful. Instead of tearing other women down, we should be lifting each other up. It's the right thing to do, imo. I do view her comment as sexist and frankly rather insulting. Ya know...is it the whole we put our boys in sports thing and teach them teamwork values via sports and girls aren't getting that? Female CEO's have found that other women don't seem to pull together as a team in this respect and instead are busy fighting each other, hence we end up on the lower end of the pay scale when we're doing the exact same jobs as men. Anyhow, just an opinion. I would much rather see my fellow females succeed than fail at anything, whether I'm good at it or not.

LMFAO at thinking a WSOP and EPT final tablist doesn't play poker at a decent level.

I bolded the words you initially missed in Double Ice's post. No way he thinks reading people is 99% of overall poker success. He's not some old fart that's clueless on poker math...haha

Note that I now insulted older players; sorry to any older players that post ITT.

whooaaaaa, how did I miss this gem?
lol at assuming that AWice doesn't play poker at a "decent level"
I lol'd

Now someone in the NVG thread has stated that it's not an opinion that women are inherently worse poker players than men.

I see others already posted about why zachvac was misunderstood about what I said, but theres something I found more interesting. Infact when the forum first opened I made a thread on this [what I am about to write below] but it was promptly deleted by the mods because they thought I was trolling/sexist .

Basically zach contends that poker is a game about 1. what strategy is my opponent playing? and 2. what is the best response to this strategy? and naturally doing #2 requires a lot of logical thinking. I agree with this. But then he continues, that since being good at math is correlated with being good at logic, if you suck at math you probably suck at logic [and hence poker.]

However I have met a bunch of female poker players who are very good, that think logically about #2 but not mathematically. I guess actually another famous example isn't even a girl; does anyone remember chad batista? he was a boss at mtts and in an interview famously said (im paraphrasing) "i dont know about pot odds. my friends say 'you are getting 2 to 1', i dont even know what that means." So I feel like there are a lot of vectors towards thinking logically and chad batista could kill online mtts back in the day but score a big fat 0 on a math SAT.

I for sure agree with this... and I'm prob one of those females you are talking about
The math involved in nlh is not complicated and I think it becomes a lot of pattern recognition in the end. Even if you are not so excellent in math (and this could be the answer for why a lot of great players out there have weak math backgrounds), you just recognize situations after a while. Or if you were a mass online mtt'r like I was (~7500 mtts in ~1 year), it just becomes automatic. I think women in particular fall into this category. Jennifer Harman has said a few times, too that she is not good at math in particular, and she is one of the best players in the world, period.

And then sure, there are guys like Chad, who just have this 'feel' for the game that is innate, and there really is no way to explain it. Chad is also not a 2+2 poster and never has been. You can also make a good case that it's pretty hard to have gotten that good without having studied or posted or analyzed with other good players. Bottom line is: There is not only one way to win, and that's what is so great about this game.

P.S. I met Chad and became friends this summer at Stout's house during wsop and we all played sng's...Matt Stout, Joey Capp, Lil holdem, me, Pete Lubrano...whatta lineup! (obv I crushed )

I'm 98% certain i'm the person Katie is referring to so i'd like to clarify/add to the discussion here.

I am a female and I will be the first to admit my eyes light up when a random woman sits at my live table. Is it because I think all women suck at poker? No, absolutely not. I believe there are many brilliant, capable women poker players, who I wouldn't want at my table. However, I do feel in a random sample of men vs women the proportion of losing players is likely to be higher amongst the women and it's not even close. I hope someday my experiences lead me to expect the opposite when a woman sits but for now it's an unchosen prejudice and it's the reason I will continue to anxiously await the Ladies Event of the WSOP year after year.

That being said, for Annette to make a blanket statement saying women "suck" at poker, is naive and offensive but not surprising given her age and arrogant attitude. Really though, whoever said "everyone sucks at poker" pretty much hit the nail on the head. The vast majority of every demographic group is terrible at poker and i'm grateful each and every day for that reality

lol. you know I'm not one to kiss & tell (wait, except that one time ) but I was hoping you'd join this thread!!!! yay!

Yeah someone pmed me link to his results they're kinda irrelevant to the discussion but yeah I see what you mean thought you actually were implying that 99% of poker was reading people. Apologize for putting words in your mouth.

Agree that this is a good summary of what I was trying to say.


ok a few things I think is wrong with this. First off I'll say I have no clue who Batista is so I'm probably going to make an ass of myself again but I don't consider someone having good mtt results as proof that they're good at poker. A lot of mtt players are good at poker, but I played with a ton of people this summer with 7 figures in scores, and several were pretty horrendous (obviously the majority were pretty good though). I think any serious poker player that doesn't know what getting 2:1 even means is just plain ******ed. It's one thing if they were good and never had the chance to learn, but given what's out there that means he literally refused to learn something that's pretty ****ing important when the stacks get shallow. It's going to basically be the deciding factor in a lot of spots where he opens and gets shoved on. So I think playing mtts for a living and not taking the very small amount of time it takes to learn pot odds is like being an olympic track athlete that refuses to use their arms. It's just willfully handicapping yourself.

The other point though is that I'm not even talking about basic math like this. And I'm not talking about individuals either. Especially if you have software/friends to help you out it's easily possible you could become really good at poker without really understanding logic or math all that well. But I think it's just going to help you so much to have a solid grasp on that kind of thing. It's a lot like sports there are going to be some guys who aren't built for the sport bust their ass, work out, and end up being one of the best while some naturally gifted (I'm thinking like tall for basketball, big/muscular build for football, etc.) may be lazy and not cut it at the top. But overall the average NBA player is far above average in height, the average NFL lineman was stronger than average before he ever touched a weight, and the average olympic track athlete has longer legs than average.

So basically I'll put it this way, my argument is that on average taller people perform better at basketball than shorter people. I'm not 100% sure but I think Asians are generally shorter than average. So I think on average Americans are better than Asians at basketball. It doesn't mean that there aren't Asians who are really good (is Yao Ming still good?). It doesn't even mean that there aren't short people who are really good. But I don't think anyone would argue with my statement nor would they argue that it isn't logically formulated. Yet if I try to say that the average female is worse at poker than the average male, and use the exact same logic, you are going to use one or two outliers to try to say that I'm wrong (aka you showed me that there are good Asian/female players and also showed me a short American/math ******ed male who was really good)?

dgirl you wouldn't happen to be dmoongirl on FTP (before it died) would you?

huh?
I mean, sure, it's pretty easy to find the one hit wonders, where someone has a one time huge score to send their roi to the ceiling and then either breaks even or loses everywhere else, but I'm pretty sure there is something to be said for consistent stats showing a winning player over a large sample size! You are a self-admitted NON-mtt'r, so maybe you don't understand how to read mtt stats. Also, just because you encountered a few live luckboxes this summer, still does not 100% validate your statement.

And, no one is saying that Chad doesn't understand what getting 2:1 is or that he puts himself in exploitable situations or that he refused to learn?...I mean, do you really think that someone with results like he has, does not inherently understand or utilize these concepts? (you really don't know who he is...do some research...he was the best in the world for a long time) He obviously understands them as they relate situationally, having a long term winning history, he just may not be able to put this into words or explain exactly what he is doing. I can for sure relate to this on a personal level as well. When I first started out online, and my bf would review HH with me and would ask me why I did something - sometimes I had a difficult time explaining it, while fundamentally having played it correctly and knowing I played correctly....and then he would explain to me why I did it, and I would be like "RIGHT" that's what I was thinking! but was having a hard time putting it into words. I think it takes time for some players to be able to verbalize exactly what their thought process is, even though they are correctly applying the concepts. I think this applies to a decent amount of players who have not learned the game or "come up" through the traditional means. It is def mind boggling, but I have met too many top players both live and online who fit this description. Again: There is more than 1 way to win!

yes, dgirl = dmoongirl

heh yeah definitely self-admitted non-mtter as well as self-admitted luckbox

In general though no one will ever reach the long run in live mtts. Despite not really being an mtt regular I am pretty knowledgeable about statistics. I also have enough friends who are unfortunate enough to be mtters (they must have done something awful to want to punish themselves that hard for it) and I think I understand a bit about how bad mtt variance can be. NoahSD actually did a really good blog post awhile back about how ONLINE mtters could expect to have 1/5 losing YEARS assuming they played 5k games/year and had a 20% roi. Now sure live roi is going to be a bit higher because of the softer fields but how long does it take to play 5k games live? We're talking several lifetimes here. So while if someone I know is good says someone is good or if they do something else to show they have a good thought process that will make me think they are good but just seeing that someone has good results over a sample size that probably isn't even large enough to say with any confidence that they're a winning player doesn't usually convince me.

I definitely don't, which is why I claimed that he either probably actually wasn't that great or else he actually did know what getting 2:1 meant.


just googled him yeah I've heard of lilholdem didn't know it was him. Assumed when you used first/last name instead of online sn that it was a live pro.

Yeah for sure but I think the ones who are able to verbalize it are the ones who understand it better. A lot of the times a true test of how you understand something (not just poker) is how well you can teach it.

ah ok never knew dmoon was female pretty sure she'd be in the running for top female nlhe player then.

No disagreement from me on this one.
In additional to realizing this myself over time, I know many top players who have also come to this realization...either through doing videos or by having students.

Exactly.
Go back to my post #54 and read the last sentence. Dmoongirl is the perfect example. She is a beast and for a long time no one knew she was a girl, and in getting to know her this summer in Vegas (where in a drunken night I professed my love for her and told her how happy I was to find her yes, I remember that! ), she admitted not really knowing that there were other winning females out there. (This actually gets this thread back on track). This is not her fault or anything - the majority of her experience (like Annette's) had been online, and she had not been that involved in the 2+2 community. So how would she know about other girls? (TWSS was only created in March of this year)

zach i know you are a smart guy that plays cash well, and believe me, i think about poker in relatively the same way, but there are others who dont that are decently strong winners, not just in results but in EV; and if you dont see that there is more than one way to win you are being closeminded.

maybe not to be a huge huge galfond-esque winner though, i will admit that. but definitely there are... i donno, some random girl who beats live cash 10/20+ but when she talks about a hand, the way she describes it (in order of most relevant information / thought to least relevant) sometimes seems like it comes from a different planet. maybe a better example is cash game winners that cant count combos.

and re math: yes of course results dont imply EV. i have a math background and i am aware of the stats.