Last year, I addressed the ethics of a women-only event at the WSOP. In classic Thinking Poker fashion, I wrote a long, formalistic, and in some cases legalistic argument in defense of the event and, at least implicitly, critical of the men who insist on playing:
Segregation is reprehensible when it carries with it a “badge of inferiority” or assigns privileges and opportunities to people based on factors beyond their control. This is not the case here, where men have 50+ other WSOP events, including numerous other $1000 buy-in events, to play. Significantly, every single one of these is a male-dominated affair. Any male player would be hard-pressed to demonstrate how the existence of a single Ladies’ Event harms him personally. The purpose of this tournament is not to push men away from the game but to draw women in.
This year female poker player Victoria Coren has made the case in a much simpler and more persuasive way:
Make no mistake: the guys who sit down in this tournament are the same sort of people who’d barge past old folk in a queue, or slide their cars into disabled parking spaces. When they think they’ve spotted weakness, their minds leap immediately to their own personal gain. Which is a pretty scummy way to think, even if they don’t know they’re thinking it. They’re not just insulting the women who play, but the men who are decent enough not to. They must see those men’s good manners as weakness as well. After all, if they were really trying to make a political point about the tournament, they would protest outside – not join it.
The common-sense ethical appeal of her argument is well-encapsulated in the British slang that she uses to describe Brandon Uhl, the young man she encountered in this year’s Ladies’ Event: wanker. The Ladies’ Event is a nice, once-a-year opportunity that nearly 1000 female poker fans from around the world enjoy playing. Men who insist on entering it are selfish and rude, ruining many other peoples’ good time for their own perceived advantage. It’s as simple as that.
2 thoughts on “A Different Approach to Men in the Ladies’ WSOP Event”
Wsop has to set strict rules to keep it a women’s event. Hard to believe some men continue with this crap.
On another note. I know nearly all young gun poker players have been critical of Phil Hellmuth’s playing style, but 2 years in a row he’s beating alot of them. Final tabling the one drop is no laughing matter.
Dusty Schmidt puts out his book intended to demean him or sell books or both, but he’s nowhere to be seen at the wsop. Instead he claims tournament play doesn’t require skill, yet he can’t even cash. Seems to be alot of dusty’s out there.
I respect your opinion and would like to hear what you think.
I read the recent article by Vicky who was playing with the man in the ladies tourney and my view was how sad it is that you can’t even hold a ladies tournament and WSOP are powerless to prevent it becoming overrun with men. I would have assumed they would let the men play and then find some way to throw out a high place finisher under some obscure rule, which would mean from then on men would realize that if they cashed there would be a good chance they would be slung out with nothing.
It would seem however that the WSOP is probably too scared of being sued to enforce any sort of discipline so it all happens more and more. Maybe what they need to do is put the policing back on the players, allow any table with a majority of 6 or more players to eject a player any person accuses of un-ladylilke or discourteous play, that player then needs to be accepted onto a new table by a majority of players or if “he” cannot find a new table within 30 minutes that will accept “him” then “he” is assumed to have retired from the tourney, as soon as a risk like this is placed on men joining the game, a risk that all players run, but democracy controls, then the soft nature of the game would not seem so enticing compared to being slung out on the bubble for burping.
Comments are closed.