What's In The Cards

I posted this over on The Agon moments ago but also wanted to post it here:

Last night, I stayed up late watching the Tournament Updates on the World Series of Poker website and ESPN’s Andrew Feldman’s Twitter feeds for the latest happenings at the 2012 World Series of Poker’s “main event.”  When I finally nodded off, twelve players remained as the tournament whittled its way down to the nine players who will square off at the final table in late October.

Upon waking just after 7:00 a.m. this morning, I immediately checked to see what I had missed.  Indeed, the field had been cut to nine, but unfortunately, my main rooting interests went out in positions eleven and ten, as Elisabeth Hille of Norway and Gaelle Baumann of France just missed making the final table.

This was big news, as it’s the furthest that a pair of women together in one year has ever made it in the World Series of Poker’s 43 “main event” tournaments.  Only once – in 1995 – did a woman make the final table.  That year Barbara Enright finished fifth.  A few other times, a woman has just missed the final table, as Barbara Samuelson in 1994, Susie Isaacs in 1998, and Annie Duke in 2000 each placed tenth.  The year that Duke finished 10th, Kathy Liebert finished 17th in what, before Baumann and Hille this year, had been the highest placing pair of women in the tournament’s history.  (For a bit more on Baumann and Hille’s place in history, see this story.)

Meanwhile, in many years, no woman has even placed in the money.  For the first 16 years of the tournament (1970 to 1985), no woman placed.  (In fact, until 1978, no woman even entered the tournament.)  After Wendeen Eolis finished 25th in 1986, no woman cashed between 1987 and 1992.  In 1999, 2001, and 2002, no women cashed as well.

These numbers aren’t particularly surprising given the level of female participation in the event.  While I don’t have a figure for the number of women in the main event this year, through 58 tournaments at this year’s World Series of Poker (there are 61 tournaments total, with the Texas Hold ‘Em “Main Event” as the final tournament), it’s been reported that women made up 4.9 percent of the participants.  A general sense of the history and coverage of the main event would lead me to believe that the number of female participants in the main event wasn’t too far away from that mark. 

In other words, in what is not a surprise to anyone who follows it – and probably not a surprise to a lot of other folks as well – professional poker is a very male-dominated sport.

Now, I recognize that there are questions about whether or not poker really is a “sport,” but, regardless of one’s position on that issue, the game does draw on many conventions of sport in its coverage, its marketing, and its culture.  In doing so, it also provides us, I think, with a useful window into discussions of gendered participation in sport.  Time and again, we hear arguments that would deny women opportunities in sport based on the premise that it’s just physically impossible for women to compete with men.  Biologically, arguments like this one go, men are stronger, faster, and bigger than women, so men will always be better at games like basketball, baseball, hockey, tennis, and so on than women.  These arguments are then deployed to trump questions about culture or socialization as significant contributing factors to women’s participation and success in these and other sports.

Yet, in poker, those arguments about stronger, faster, and bigger don’t hold up.  Indeed, since research has suggested that women are better at interpreting interpersonal communication than men, if we’re going to go with biology, it would seem that there’s an argument to be made that women should dominate poker.  Still, men dominate the game, and I think the culture of poker, socialization processes into poker, and many other cultural and social processes from outside of sports that discourage women from participating in poker have to be considered here in order to explain adequately why the game is so dominated by men.  That these practices and processes involving poker mirror practices and processes involving other sports—and the ability of ESPN to market its coverage of poker relies mightily on how heavily they do—compels us, I think, to recognize more fully the roles of culture and socialization in perpetuating inequitable opportunities for women throughout the world of sports.  If, as the saying goes, the cards don’t lie, then they appear to tell us that arguments for gendered inequality based in biology do.