also this may help you zach since before i was having trouble finding examples.

actually as i alluded to earlier, i have been interested for quite some time about how... well, its generally women, but some guys too... how they think about poker, because when talking to these women, they "don’t communicate in the same exact and precise analytical way that other poker players do" which either leads me to believe that either 1. they are analyzing in a similar way, but using a version of analysis that is 'chunked' in the brain so the details can't be interpolated, or 2. [way more likely] they are thinking about other things entirely, (and i wanna know what those things are.)

Couldn't it just be environment? and who our influences are?
I mean, if you are surrounded by people who do verbalize their thought process, eventually you will start to talk like them, even though your understanding remains the same; well it prob gets better, actually.
Pre-2009 I felt exactly the same way Danielle does...Eventually though, as my circle of friends expanded I learned terminology and how to verbalize my analysis, and can now analyze with the best of them...but Danielle lives in an area that has virtually no live poker and she has a family, so it's challenging to travel and be exposed to other top players; thus her mostly online career.

I'd be willing to bet that if she or any other player like her, lived in a grind house with top online/live mtt pros for a year that her statement would be the exact opposite at the end of 12 months and she would be able to analyze with the best of them in the more "normal" and "understood" way the rest of the poker world does.

Do you think that she is thinking in a similar way and it is just communication differences? Thats what I feel you implied but you didn't make it so clear to me. I think a different thought process is making itself known through different communication, but I am not so confident about that.

Also I kind of feel you somehow are implying the more popular way of thinking [or even communicating] is most effective... dont know what I think about that.

Maybe a little bit of both, actually. There is definitely no "right" way to think about any one subject, especially poker since it is all so situational. But fundamentally, the end results probably end up the same and so mostly it would boil down to a communication difference.


I actually wasn't advocating or implying one way over another.
I'm saying that a player like Chad or Danielle, can learn to analyze/communicate in the more general way and that environment may be a large reason for why they can't exactly describe (verbalize) why they do 'x' and why they do 'y'.

From my own experience, I think it is advantageous to understand both (obv there is more than one way to communicate, but for simplicity I say 2) ways, but also be well versed in the "normal" way for basic efficiency. So for example, if I'm talking to highlandfox about a standard hand 2 years ago it might take 10 minutes for me to explain myself, whereas today, that same hand takes 30 seconds. Then we move on to the next hand. So now we can potentially get in 20 hands in the same time it used to take for 1.
Whose to say which method is better? It's whatever works for the player and if they find a win that way then they continue with that way. There are plus/minuses for both ways.
But I generally enjoy not being yelled at, so I tend to take the faster, more concise route .

Couple things: One, I certainly think it is possible there are other unknown women winning players out there who are still hiding behind the curtain. To be honest if it hadn't been for my decision to participate in the "BOOM" project, I very well may have chosen to continue to remain mostly anonymous. I have browsed these forums for years and have seen what I would sometimes consider to be a misogynist environment. Opening yourself up to that as a woman can be a daunting task. I'm sure there are other women out there who feel the same way.

Despite the fact that I have always been aware this could be a possibility, I admit I was surprised by the number of competent women poker players I have met via this forum and after meeting other TWSS members in Vegas this year i'm certainly more open to the idea of possible women rockstar grinders nobody knows about.

I'm running late for something but I'm going to come back later and touch on Katie's comment about how environment may contribute to players like Chad and I not being able to verbalize why we do X or Y, yet still being successful players. This is one of the reasons I have turned down coaching/video requests over and over again but, more on that later

When you come back, can you tell me if you think that you are thinking significantly different from other people (or maybe that other things that are way less relevant to other people are way more relevant to you and vice versa), or if it simply a communication thing?

It's ridiculously dumb to think all subgroups suck equally.

Why? I think you should have to prove inequality rather than equality. We should assume that everyone sucks equally unless there's convincing evidence that a particular group sucks more.

Unfortunately for any group that's in the minority, they are often stuck trying to prove that they are equal rather than the majority group having to prove that they are not equal.

I hope to explain this in a way that makes sense but the basis of this discussion is my inability to express my poker thinking so it would only be appropriate for me to fail I suppose

I've never been a math person. When I was in grade school I was actually very good at math but I hated it. I'd say numbers are somewhat anxiety provoking for me. In high school I scored ridiculously high on the language/reading comprehension portion of my ACTs and below average on science and math. I think at least part of this can be attributed to the anxiety I mentioned. I truly hate numbers. This obviously doesn't fit the bill for most successful poker players, and it caused me to struggle with feeling inadequate for the majority of my career despite my good results. My husband (who is a breakeven player) is a very analytical, mathematical person. I would frequently feel embarrassed when we'd talk about a hand and he'd be able to rattle off statistics and numbers that I didn't really understand. I think anybody who has played a significant sample of online cash games with me would be surprised by this because I’ve been told I play a very fundamentally solid game and I don't think you can have the results I’ve had with huge mathematical leaks.

The mystery is how I’ve made this work. I myself am unsure if I actually have the mathematical competency most high level poker players have locked up somewhere deep inside my brain and my hatred for numbers prevents it from coming to the surface? Or am I just really lucky that my instincts are usually at least somewhat mathematically correct? Either way my entire career I’ve had a hard time explaining why I am doing what I’m doing in certain situations, and as I said it lead to a feeling of inadequacy for many years. I'm finally at the point now where I’m like "Who the hell cares? It works," but I do still struggle with deciding if I should try to master the math of poker or if I risk it messing up whatever weird instincts I have? As far as this relates to being a woman, who the hell knows? I feel like we'd need a bigger sample size of men and women who operate the same way I do to truly know but if I had to guess I would say it's more likely for woman than men to operate in a poker game without the mathematical background.

**disclaimer: Please don't think I’m saying I can't do simple math or equations, I certainly can and I’m definitely above average in mathematical skills compared to the general population. However, I’m probably in the bottom 1% of successful high stakes players.

A person who actually plays poker on a regular basis would never make this statement.

If your beliefs were valid, than making assumptions about players would be futile, yet winning players make a killing doing just that (and explicitly lecturing how to do so in training videos). While I understand you don't believe in anecdotal evidence, in the absence of clinical winrate trials, personal experience is all we have to go on.

SGT RJ, I suspect you might be getting hung up on the male/female subgroups. It might be easier to see this objectively by looking at age defined subgroups. For example, take a group of 5 year old children, a group of 22 year old college kids, and a group of 75 year old retireees. Are you really going to argue that the winrates (or lossrates) for each group will be the same? You can't make an educated guess that one of these groups is going to suck worse than the other 2?

What I mean to say is, if you sit at a new table and don't automatically assume the young Asian kid is very loose and the 80 year old man is insanely tight, you're doing it wrong.

isn't there a way for someone to just look up the percentage of females who have entered wsop events and the percentage of females who have cashed/won wsop events and compare it to men or something similar to this?

I don't get what you mean by more than one way to win. Of course there is more than one way to win. There are some pretty good midstakes winners (don't really have enough experience with high-stakes online to comment on that) who are huge nits, there are some that try to win every hand, and many in between. There are some that are super raise-happy postflop and some that are super passive with their draws, made hands, and bluffs (aka rather than raise/bomb/bomb their bluffs they realize that since they're passive with their other hands they can get away with float/float/bet when checked to and rep a much larger range than raising at any point). But things every single good poker player generally know how to do is:

1. Exploit their image, whatever it is. If they're super bluff-happy they appropriately know they can value bet thinly a lot. If they're nitty preflop they know they can get away with murder postflop.

2. I guess this isn't even really a new number more an extension of #1, but they know how people react to their style and know how to counter those reactions.

Neither of these have much to do with hard math but both are just understanding basic logic/responses/etc and being able to conceptualize ranges in different spots and how they change. They may not verbalize it but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single good poker player who doesn't on some level think about ranges.

So I definitely agree with you that there's more than one way to win, but every winning player also has some of the same fundamentals. It's like a baseball swing. If you watch baseball you'll see some pretty unique swings from some pretty damn good hitters. But if you study them you'll realize that all the swings are simply different ways of getting to the ball with a quick motion and a high bat speed and you'll realize that most of the mechanics are pretty much identical. It doesn't matter if they wave their bat around like Griffey or crouch deep like Pujols look at some pictures at contact and almost all will look identical.

So yeah of course there's more than one way to win, but I think any winning player of any gender at least has the concept of range and at any given point if you asked them what their range looked like to an observer and what their opponent's range looks like they could tell you with pretty good accuracy. Also if you gave their opponent a range and gave them a range I'm pretty sure they'd be able to extremely accurately deduce what they would do with various parts of the range you assigned them in order to make the most money in the long run. And that's all that really matters in poker, even though doing those things can get insanely complicated.

nope...people who are good at poker are born with the way to think about it...most people who win have a way of htinking about it that's difficult to express...I know a lot of people who say they play on "feel" but what their "feel" is is just innate logic and mathematical skills that you have to have to win...even if you have a grasp and feel for what your opponents cards are you still have to put the cause and effect together to arrive at the best solution to getting their chips

Your example is a little off, since a 5 year old doesn't even have the necessary mental capacity to do all of the math required simply due to his age and the usual time table for brain development.

So you're saying that saying men are better than women is okay because older players tend to be nittier than young Asians? Also, surely you see a world of difference in making assumptions about playing tendencies (he's probably a LAGtard, he's probably a nit) and saying that one or the other is fundamentally worse at poker, right? We all know that there are plenty of circumstances were being a LAGtard is best and a nit worst, but there are other circumstances where the opposite is true. You're using a poor substitute (playing style) to substitute for our discussion (do women suck more than men).

Again, there's no real evidence to suggest that women are at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to poker playing, at least not intellectually. There's been some discussion as to whether or not the overall poker climate may make in harder for women to get as involved as quickly (which could potentially effect the rate at which they improve). Women might start off with more hurdles to clear due to a GENERAL slightly worse math intelligence and the social obstacles, but unless you are talking about complete fish, I don't think that there's any compelling evidence that a male player with 5K hands under his belt is better than his female counterpart. And since most fish start off not giving a rats ass about the math anyway, how much of a difference does men's small advantage in that area really give them.

The more hands played, the more likely any disadvantage is to be equalized by experience.

Her statement is that girls are less competitive. If this is true, than doesn't that lend itself the the idea the women play poker more poorly. Granted, she said this in just about the most innappropriate way.

As proof that men are more competitive (men have more testosterone, testosterone makes them more competitive):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18234200

You're arguing about this assuming that group inequalities are due to inherent differences. That's not a necessary assumption for this conversation. All there needs to be is correlation between being a woman and having played less hands or being less experienced to make this statement true. Thus women probably 'suck more' at poker due to other factors than any inherent differences. I don't particularly care why, to be honest. In reality, women who have sat down at my poker tables have sucked at a far higher rate than men. Similarly, black players and businessmen have also sucked at a higher rate than non-black and non-businessman. I certainly don't take this to mean any inherent ability differences between the groups, but it's basically irrelevant to me. I just use the information to make money and table select.

I think that's a valid point. If you operate under the assumption that women then to have less experience than men (IDK if it's true or not, but I don't think it's a really out there assumption), then they would also tend to be poorer all around players due to lack of experience.

I think you kind of have to assume that's only true at the lower levels, though. I doubt there's any difference at the higher stakes.

I am much like your husband, dani, very good at math but virtually break even in the online poker world. You know this personally from my AIM conversations about my triple-draw frustrations with you (I'm Vman96, obv).

When I've watched you play online, I think the biggest portion of your success is: you are outstanding with betting pattern recognition. I believe this can lead to great success at the poker table, even if one has only a weak grasp on the intricacies of poker mathematics.

I, on the other hand, generally suck at picking up patterns, leading me to making incorrect calls/folds that can easily eat up profit. Also a lot of people who have a good grasp of appropriate ranges/values when analyzing a hand while in front of a calculator (i.e. me), totally misapply the range when playing a hand online/live and cost themselves significant equity. These leaks often can be fixed by what you have a lot of: experience.

bump

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0724192258.htm

A lot of female poker players in casino and homegames I visit occasionally and I must say they all suck. I have yet to run into a female poker player that grasps the fundamentals.

I think a solid female poker player is a rare breed(cash games). If you are one then note that you are awesome and exceptional from my experience.

heh so after this thread I was far more observant when playing poker on gender differences and gotta say I think I was wrong. I played with several females that seemed very solid and almost all the huge fish I've played with since this thread have been male. Played with Jaimiesomething who posts here (wawa avatar), Melanie Wisener, and ironically Annette, who all seemed very very good. I've always thought Annette came off really badly on TV and stuff but she was pretty friendly in person, although she wouldn't agree to shave her head if I shaved mine

Also that article is kinda interesting. My experience was just our county's public school magnet program for math/science/computer science picks 100 people/yr blind to names/gender/race/etc. and always ends up being something like 75-80 guys in it (also disproportionate amount of Asians but that's different topic). Similarly most engineering colleges end up with more males than females and vice versa for most liberal arts colleges. Maybe those differences have more to do with selection bias?

perhaps selection bias, but if that wasn't present it still wouldn't mean that "men are better than women at math/logic," it just means that men pursue fields related to those things at a higher rate than women. i'd chalk that up to self-fulfilling stereotypes and the sexism that seems pretty common in graduate/professional work involving the sciences.

That's Jamie Kerstetter (JamieAnn).
And yes, she is confirmed beast.

Maybe I don't understand selection bias but my understanding when I used the term was that it was that more men would apply to engineering-related stuff and more women would apply to liberal arts-related stuff. So if two groups are similarly skilled and 3 times as many of one group is applying, you can expect approximately 3 times as many to make it (or possibly slightly more because I'd expect more of those 25% to be good at it while a lot of people who are bad at it would be more likely to give up).

But yeah I mean assuming the article is correct, that seems like the only possibility. Interesting stuff.