If you couldn't tell by my previous post, I don't take every complaint/horror story from female players at face value like you naively do.

Well they are certainly more similar than hunting & fishing. What would be the activity closest to poker? Maybe competitive/league bridge? I believe, like Scrabble, this is also majority female except at the very highest levels.

So you are saying it is about the behavior of the players rather than the game itself. I think I mostly agree with this.

Hearing people share their personal experiences is naive compared to burying your head in the sand and pretending it isn't real. Got it.

That's not what I'm saying, not even close. But keep on with your BS oh wise one.


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Yeah, it's BS because you don't believe it even though others are sharing their personal experiences to the contrary. You have no idea what you're talking about and refuse to read the thread so I'm done with you. Have fun in your alternate reality, champ!

If women were constantly insulted, flirted with or made to feel like they don't belong at the tables it would be a story on CNN.

If a female regular who plays where I play claimed that it's true, I would know that I was dealing with a nut.

The idea that there couldn't be casual/persistent sexism in poker rooms because if there was it would be a major news story might be the craziest thing I've read so far.

OP said "constant". To me, that means at least once pretty much every session. That is the only assertion that's crazy. If you want to include women being treated differently than men treat each other, largely meaning with extra respect and kindness, then it might be true.

edit: it sounds like the poker table must be the most sexist place in the western world and full of the most buffoonish men, and if that's true expect to see an expose on tv soon.

further edit: is it legal for a company to allow patrons to be insulted and bullied? I guess it might be. If it weren't then women who are treated thus should complain and if the casino's doesn't fix the problem, sue them.

I suspect that pit would address it if a woman complained(which she shouldn't have to do) but perhaps not vigorously and if that's the case she should go to management. I'm pretty sure they would do something about it, though I know it would be awful to have to go through this trouble.

If you are a man and hear a woman get abused or insulted or notice that she has heard sexist comments, you should speak up and stop it. If you don't want to do that you should go and tell the pit so they can do something about it discretely(so as not to embarrass the woman who might feel like disappearing). If pit doesn't do something which actually fixes the problem you should go to management.

As far as getting men to stop ogling, it's difficult but if it's excessive, you should mock the man for doing it and maybe he'll stop and that will discourage others from ogling.

As far as flirtation goes, the woman will just have to ignore it. As far as being treated extra kindly, she will have to ignore that too.

Don't be surprised if a more civil environment doesn't generate a boom because it just might be that the real reason so few women play poker is because woman like security more than men do and are more averse to risk than men are.

Just because a particular behavior isn't overtly sexist doesn't mean women will necessarily be comfortable with it. I gave staring at your opponent as an example earlier in the thread.

So then why do people put the onus on regs to stop this (harmless) behavior rather than telling women to suck it up while reinforcing that it is indeed harmless? This constant pandering to potential new players has never really worked and I don't see that ever changing.

It's not on harmless behavior and that's kind of like saying the onus should be on women to tolerate being raped rather than working to make rapists rape less. That you think asking for basic human decency is a form of pandering says a lot about you.

So we're comparing staredowns at the poker table to rape now. Good stuff.

I have read here and other places that limit games have more women, and I notice more women playing limit games myself. I played 4/8 LH for the first time this weekend, and I just don't get it. That game is....******ed; there is no strategy other than calculating your odds, no getting reads, no implied odds, or making moves...it's just playing the cards. It was more dull than online poker.
I like the rush of pulling off a good bluff to double my stack from collecting information for hours before hand; the fun is taken away in limit games for me.

Some people prefer playing more hands as opposed to waiting hours for the chance to pull off a bluff.

Although, if you can regularly double your stack on a no-limit bluff, I can see why you wouldn't find LHE interesting enough.

You don't understand limit poker. It's a much more technical game. In PL/NL poker, you can sometimes overcome being somewhat unsound on earlier streets. In game like LHE, you are going to be punished in the long run for making too many preflop mistakes.

There is bluffing in LHE, but bluffing is usually something more like raising with the second-best hand to get the best hand to fold, while the draws stay in. Sometimes, you are betting to "buy" additional outs.

Check-raising is a significant skill in your toolbox. I'd even say that if you don't understand check-raising, you can't be a winning limit player. You have to be much more in tune with predicting player actions at the table. Understanding your implied odds is very important.

Some people may like a game like NLHE because it feels like you can impose your will on the table. LHE frustrates some people because you can't just muscle people around; you have to understand and accept reality.

How about just making adds like "Still fighting for equal chances and equal pay? Get your fair share by playing poker."

I dont think that there are many sports where women have the chance to win the same money like men. The one question for me remains: if you consider that men and women have a similar distribution of intelligence over all people shouldn't there be a women who could challenge Magnus Carlson in chess?

+1

To take NickMPK's list -
1) Passively putting your money into a machine with no control over if you win has nothing to do with poker.
2) Is this stuff like farmville? It's nothing like live poker. If we are including online poker (as I tried earlier) then sexism at the table can't be the explanation for why women don't play it.
3) The lowest common stakes in live play is NL200. What are the stakes outside the highest division of competitive scrabble?

The three activities that exercise the same parts of the brain as no limit poker are:

Business
Politics
Hunting

all of which have a problem with not enough women.

I think the above posts are on the right track. Note that what they say about NLHE could also be applied to Business, Politics, Hunting.

I'm still can't fathom how "business, politics, and hunting" are more similar to poker than Scrabble or bridge. It is true that these games are played at much lower financial stakes than casino poker. But that's why I mentioned slot machines...a claim that women generally don't like gambling for significant money is clearly false looking at the demographics of slot machine players.

Even accepting that your comparisons to business and politics, to say these professions are dominated by men because women inherently don't like them is absurd. Until just a few decades agos, women were presented with many social and even legal barriers to entry in these fields. As these barriers have come down, the percentage of women engaged increases. The number of women in the US Congress and Senate is around 20%, in state legislatures it is 25%, and increases almost every elections. In several areas around the world, this is more like 40%. 40% of MBA graduates are also women, so they are clearly just about as interested in business as well.
(I have no idea about hunting, which seems a particularly inapt comparison anyway as it inherently involves physical violence.)

By contrast, the percentage of women in poker is at most 5%, and decreasing over time. Unlike politics and business, younger women seem much less likely to get involved than earlier generations. If poker is so much like business and politics, why are women flooding into business and politics but fleeing away from poker?

Thanks for the info. I'll do some reading before I try limit again.

I agree this is key. Most evidence to date suggests that women very rarely have the top few people in a given field, even in areas that might be considered more female friendly (old fashioned traditional female roles) such as cooking and fashion design, women are rarely in the top few.

Women do excel of course in many areas and are probably the stronger all around gender but when it comes to peak, genius levels of performance or excellence it is nearly always men, and the glass ceiling issue is probably not a big enough factor to explain things away.

I still don't see how the discussion of whether women can compete at the very top level of a given field is relevant to this topic. There is some scientific evidence that a variety of neurologically atypical conditions are much more prevalent in men, and it is also likely that people displaying genius level aptitude for something like chess or poker have one of these conditions.

But genius-level players are not playing in 99.99% of games at your local casino. There is absolutely no reason why women cannot compete on a completely level playing field with men at the typical 1/2 NL game.

Women are great until you get to know them

Nice when strike up a conversation with a new female as it just feels good to flirting and haveing fun

Most like bit banter as long as not to much in ya face , little sexist joke is natural

Like anything in Live you get men that are sweet and nice and men that are just ego who don't get that they annoying everyone.

My two cents: Women don't play a lot of poker because women aren't commonly seen at a poker table. While circular, I think this is true. In short, people don't like doing things that aren't done by other people that are "like" them.

For instance, if you're a man consider how you'd feel participating in an activity that was open to any gender, but commonly dominated by women. For instance, would you feel self-conscious going to a spin class, or a sewing circle, or a book club? None of these are activities that are specific to women, but it would be intimidating or feel weird to participate in them, especially if you were the only man. I assume women feel the same way about poker.

This would be true if poker players, men and women alike, played poker to play at smallish stakes, stay there forever, and never have any aspirations to move up and win big or win something big.

So if women in general are self aware that moving up is either beyond their scope and ability or will be a tough and expensive struggle then it will put them off.

Put another way, many women are better at game selection than men; by choosing not to play at all!