If you've played in local live smallish stakes MTTs a lot, you'll know that the cream rises to the top just the same as in higher buy ins. Players can not luck their way to consistently high finishes throughout a whole year and a number of today's top players started out in live small buy in MTTs and were the local crushers of their day.

Someone earlier mentioned a lack of a feeder system, having lower stakes rankings would help in this respect.

(Aria $25K high roller comps, aren't they 3 or 4 tables a lot of the time?)

First, do you have any idea how many small-stakes tournaments take place in cardrooms and casinos across the country each week? Hundreds. Somebody doing okay once a week isn't going to make your rankings.

Do you really think that somebody in Minnesota who maybe plays one tournament every month or so is going to care that Mary Smith in Seattle won three $75 tournaments last month? Where would anybody even hear about the rankings?

Obviously you don't agree, but I can't imagine somebody being motivated to play more poker by a nationwide ranking of players they've never heard of and will never play against.

No, it would not.

I'm not against more players. But women are not a natural demographics for poker. Women as a group do not like poker. And it has nothing to do with the urban myth of harassment at the table - women and men simply tend to like different hobbies. For this reason it's much easier to attract new male players to poker than female. You're really swimming against the current if you're trying to attract women to poker.

On another note, 90-95% of players are lifetime losers. So bringing in more fish won't be of much help to them. They might lose less or break even but it really won't make that much of a difference anyway. "If there was only more fish, I'd make so much money playing poker" - yeah, right

Have you been at a table with three or four women who just won't shut the **** up? Who think they're at happy hour? Not a pleasant experience for most men at the table. So it goes both ways.

I've been thinking about this problem of inequality in poker and I believe I came up with the solution which will allow us to have perfectly equal and diverse poker demographics. Each group's participation will be equal to that group's share of the U.S. population.

Let me introduce: POKER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION!

To achieve equality and defeat patriarchy and institutional racism we need to encourage oppressed groups to play poker and discourage privileged groups from playing. We will use economic incentives to achieve our goal.

For cash games it will work like this but tournaments will be similar. For $1000 in chips. The following groups need to buy in as follows:

White women $500
White men $2000
Asians $1500
African American women $100
African American men $400
Hispanic men $700
Hispanic Women $200

The above is obviously satire and an attempt to show how stupid seeking to achieve perfect diversity and equal representation in every aspect of life is.

You continue to bang this drum while overlooking that very few people just jump into tournament play. Even those who play cash for many months and years do not always have an interest in tournament play. Most people aren't going to pay fifty or a hundred bucks each week for a tournament to learn how to play the game...

The beginning cash player simply does not give a damn about your shiny bauble of rankings. Even many who play on a semi-regular basis don't give a damn about rankings...

The issue here isn't about figuring out who is 'good' or 'better' based upon some arbitrary ranking. It is about growing the player pool.

In your true knuckle-dragging fashion, you completely miss that nothing in this thread has been about even ATTEMPTING 'perfect diversity and equal representation.' It IS about trying to increase the player pool (and hopefully get rid of the hoodie-headphone-antisocial-antihygienic stereotypes at the same time).

Poker, at its most basic level, IS a social game. Yet you seem to miss that reality of cash play...

Sure. I generally enjoy the conversation and also enjoy that it tilts people who take themselves and poker way too seriously.

Women make up a healthy % of my local limit holdem playing pool. When I played stud it was mostly the same. The sad fact is that NLHE cash games tend to amplify most of the unpleasant things about casino poker, and most of that is related to certain men having trouble with their fragile egos.

Men are terrible in many ways. Women are terrible in many ways. NLHE just happens to tend to bring out the most annoying aspects of men, so it follows that we are going to find that among the very small % of all humans willing to deal with such a toxic environment to play poker, the vast majority will be men.

That depends. Are we having your strawman argument about trying to create perfect demographic representation in all poker rooms? Or are we discussing increasing the player pool by getting more women interested/comfortable in poker?

Need more celebrity poker games, and televised games where women are featured eg. Battle of the Sexes, Battle of the Exes, Family Feud sngs, etc.

My whole argument can be summed up as this.

Women don't play poker because they don't like it. And the reason they don't like it is not "table harassment" from men - there is no harassment on any significant scale. The reason is women and men tend to like different hobbies.

Trying to get more women to play poker is like trying to get more men into aerobics or knitting. It's going against the grain and you won't get very far.

If you want to increase player pool you should concentrate on attracting the natural demographics which is men. Also poker depends on having discretionary income so whites and Asians have higher disposable incomes. So actually we should focus on attracting more white and Asian men if we actually care about getting more players rather than the SJW ideal of diversity in everything.

I feel like I address this argument in several posts earlier in the thread that you don't even mention. If there is something inherent about poker that women don't like, why are so many activities that are closest to poker (organized social play of Scrabble, bridge, other casino games) dominated by women?

The reason men don't participate much in knitting is likely the fact that making clothing was traditionally assigned as a women's role for most of recent history, and thus there was a social stigma attached to men doing a perceived feminine activity. It does "go against the grain", but "the grain" is socially assigned gender norms, not the inherent activity.

Your point is similar to: "because women like slots they should also like poker". Poker is not slots. My point is that women do not like the inherent activity of poker. Why exactly? Who knows. Maybe they don't like the risk. Maybe they prefer not making decisions like in slots. Maybe they don't like the aggression and conflict. Who knows. There would have to be a scientific study on this. But the games are very different. Female and male brains are different. Female and male psychology are very different.

Also, 7.5 percent of chess players in the US are women. Why is that? Table harassment? "Socially assigned gender norms"? I don't think so!

Women tend not to like strategic games in general. And poker is a strategic game.

Maybe they don't like it because they're told they don't like it. Maybe they don't like it because they're busy being encouraged to cook and knit instead of play poker. Maybe they don't like it because when they do decide to try it out, they are made to feel as though they don't belong. Either through direct harassment, passive harassment, or being coddled at the table like a child who doesn't know what to do.

Or maybe those things have nothing to do with it so why even try to change it, right? Of course, if we don't try to change it we'll never know but random internet e-tough guy says it isn't real so we shouldn't even discuss it.

Let's see.

Silent headphones guys not talking to women = that's passive harassment, bad. Women don't like that.

Table being "too nice" to women = that's coddling, bad. Women don't like that.

Talking to women and flirting with women = that's harassment, that's very bad. Women don't like that.

Don't you see how ridiculous this is? You're insisting that the table treats women exactly as everyone else yet you're putting out a set of mutually contradictory conditions that aim to ensure the "just right" social environment for women that cannot be off even by one degree or they won't feel comfortable. Because women are sooooo fragile it has to be just right for them. I actually find that to be misogynist on your part!

Is it that hard for you to just treat everyone the same? Really, that's all you need to do. Don't coddle, don't flirt, don't belittle because they're women. Just treat everyone the same. This really shouldn't be that difficult and you really shouldn't get defensive about it.

What's ridiculous is you drawing absurd false comparisons to avoid the issue being discussed. You're so adamant about calling everyone else a SJW or whatever else that you don't even see what we're saying.

You didn't address any of the strategic games I brought up...Scrabble and bridge. Even beyond that, aren't things like Candy Crush strategic games? That is also overwhelmingly played by women.

Finally, if women just inherently don't like poker, why were there so many more women playing poker (as a % of all players) a few decades ago?

...or maybe they just don't like it.

You're trying to find some magical explanation to account for the fact that so few women play (preferably one that blames men of course). It must be mistreatment or this or that. You are refusing to acknowledge the simple truth that women and men are different in many ways and tend to like different stuff.

Lost in all of this is that there are MANY women, who if asked, would tell you the reason they don't play has NOTHING to do with risk or disliking strategy games, but rather is because they believe they don't know HOW to play.

I've got staff in my office that don't realize they can play with as little as a few hundred dollars. Or that home games are often played for even less. In some cases, they have been actively dissuaded from playing, some by people who espouse the same bile spewed by some in this thread.

I don't know anything about Scrabble and bridge so I can't comment. I would not call Candy Crush a strategic game.

My guess is that fewer women play now because it's much tougher, less trendy and less social but it's just a guess. A good example is someone who posted here - his mom doesn't play anymore because it's all serious silent young guys who just take her money. It's not fun.

Answer me why only 7.5% of U.S. chess players are women. Is it table harassment or "Socially assigned gender norms"?

So then you are claiming that women are indeed being driven away by the behavior of other players, not anything inherent in the game.

I don't really know much about chess. Where is the 7.5% figure drawn from? Even if true, that is significantly higher than the participation of women in casino poker. But I feel like many of the arguments made in this this thread about poker could probably apply to chess as well. Additionally, unlike both poker and games like Scrabble or bridge, it doesn't strike me that chess is often played at casual social gatherings.

Sigh. This is where you're coming off the rails. Yes, it may be that men just gravitate toward poker more. It may have nothing to do with how women are treated at the table.

But it might. So let's try to treat people equal and see what happens. If nothing changes, fine. If so, great. Worst case scenario, we make the poker room a little less crappy to be in. Is that such a bad thing?

And of course I would "blame it on men." Who else would I blame it on when we're talking about the way women are treated at the table? Other women? Transgenders? I'm a man. I'm a husband and a father. I've never protested anything. I had to google what SJW meant. The idea that just because I'm all for treating people like people and being inclusive somehow makes me a "SJW" hippy anti-man protestor type is both laughable and sad. Sad that you automatically assume so much about someone just because they want other people treated right.

There are MTT leaderboards and prizes per buy in range in online poker and have been for years.

Yes to make the top 100 worldwide in <$150 live buy ins you'd have to play volume, but if it was me I'd still like to monitor my progress even if I was ranked 832nd one week and 746th the following week.

Rankings are additionally shown per country so 746th in the world <$150 might be 35th in your country.

Players accepting all conventions in poker is a weakness, because poker is quite a backward and slow to make progress industry.

Everyone at all stakes in Hendon Mob listed tournaments already has a ranking but there's no way under the current system to measure your ranking within a pool of similar stakes live MTT players.

Naturally many players are not motivated by rankings but many are and if you attach annual prizes or possibly bigger buy in live entry prizes to a rankings system this will motivate people to play more and to try harder to improve their game.

Many poker rooms/festivals/poker series have their own stand alone MTT rankings systems. Why do they do this if it's a bad idea?