Most estimates place women as making up about 5 percent of the players in poker rooms. The highest-ranking woman is Vanessa Selbst in 70th place with nearly $12 million. No woman has more than three.īryn Kenney is the all-time leader with more than $56 million in career tournament earnings, according to the Hendon Mob Poker Database. Phil Hellmuth is the all-time leader with 15 WSOP bracelets. Enright remains the only woman to make the final table of the WSOP Main Event (fifth in 1995). Only three women are in the Poker Hall of Fame - Johnson, Barbara Enright and Jennifer Harman.

Interviews with the three women in the Poker Hall of Fame and other women’s poker advocates try to shed light on the issue.īy any measure, women make up a tiny part of the poker world. No one expects women to ever make up 50 percent of players in poker rooms. Definitely some are turned off by what can be a “boys will be boys” atmosphere that sometimes verges into vulgar or even outright abusive. Maybe some don’t have the same amount of discretionary income to gamble with. Perhaps they are not as naturally aggressive as men. That gender gap has proved persistent despite the efforts of industry insiders, who know that opening up poker to the other half of the population is the key to fueling the game’s growth.Īs Johnson, Fisher and other women’s poker advocates point out, there is no simple answer to why more women don’t play poker. Walk into a poker room, and you’ll see men of all ages, races and socioeconomic backgrounds trading bets and bluffs.īut you won’t see many women, perhaps one for every two tables in play.

She said she turned to her friend Jan Fisher and said, “This is why they have ladies events.” The Poker Hall of Fame member went outside while her event was on a break, and Johnson said she saw two men fighting, another vomiting and another urinating against a wall. Poker is a man’s world, and that was never clearer to Linda Johnson than at the World Series of Poker a couple of years ago. Barbara Enright plays in a World Poker Tour event at the Aria in an undated photo.

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