Women in Poker Hall of Fame
Lat week I had the honor of giving the keynote address at the Women in Poker Hall of Fame dinner. I have had a few requests to post the speech I gave so in response to that I am posting it here. Enjoy and let’s meet the 10% challenge!
I am so honored to be speaking in front of this amazing group that has done so much to support the role of women in this industry.
2011 has been a tumultuous year for the poker industry, to say the least. Last year when Jeffrey [Pollack] spoke about a change in the poker industry I am pretty sure he was not foretelling the government shutdown of online poker on Black Friday. Our industry has been deeply affected by Black Friday as everyone has been forced into a position of self-examination, a redefinition of who and what we are and what we do to achieve success and excellence in poker.
If you are an American player who has mainly grinded online you now may need to redefine yourself as a live action player or, even, make the extremely difficult choice to relocate to another country in order to continue to play and maintain your livelihood.
Maybe you are on the business side of the poker media – and now you are scrambling to creatively fill the void left by the advertisers forced out of the country.
Maybe you are on the other side of the camera – working production watching as poker show after poker show is canceled.
We have all been forced to re-examine who we are and what we must do to carry-on.
For myself, I was forced into a personal re-examination this spring because of an event that happened just prior to Black Friday: the death of my mother. Her death, not surprisingly, triggered a lot of deep thinking about my priorities in life, my life with her and the deep impact and influence she had on me. There was a sort of strange beauty for me in the symmetry of working to be a part of the redefinition of poker, through my work at Epic, and the redefinition of myself as I have gone through this difficult personal journey.
So, as I was considering what I was going to talk about with you today, a nerve-wracking task to say the least, I had an epiphany. There surely is no better audience to talk to about the impact of a woman on my life than this audience. It was at that moment I found my voice and found my key message: MENTORSHIP.
Without my mother’s mentorship, I am positive that I would never have become a poker player. Ironically, my mother never played poker. To be fair, she was an adept card player, but at the time she grew up poker would never have been an option for her. So her mentorship was not about teaching me the intricacies of the game. It was about giving me courage – the courage that as a women, no matter what barriers to entry their might be, or whatever you might want to try – that if you believe in the power of your own intellect you can accomplish anything.
It is that belief that I truly have to thank her for instilling in me and it is certainly what allowed me to dare.
Now, as everyone in this room knows, there are so many barriers to entry for a female poker player.
We are told as children: Don’t be aggressive, it is unbecoming. Yet aggression is a key component of great poker play.
As women we are also told: Don’t be competitive, it’s not becoming, stand on the sidelines and cheer. And yet an intense competitive spirit is integral to success at the tables.
We are told: No boys will like you if you are good at math. Write poetry or draw. (and yes I was told those things by some). Yet, math skills and the embracing of that discipline is also so essential to successful play.
And then there is the simple intimidation at the poker table – a table always filled with mostly, if not all men – when certainly at the time I started playing and where I started playing, the words sexual harassment were not even in the lexicon (nor could they be spelled by their practitioners).
So I think back to how I dared:
How did I dare descend to the basement room in the back of the seedy Crystal Lounge in downtown Billings, Montana? How did I dare enter that testosterone laden place through a cloud of Marlboro Man tobacco smoke, and take my place at a table where I was the only ‘girl’?
And, yes, I was a girl, both in name and in reality – just in my 20’s, among ranchers and old men who swore at me when I would win and treated me like worse than nothing because their very manhood seemed challenged by my invasion.
I know that this feeling is not unique – so many of you in this room have experienced this, the same treatment, the same fears that I had.
So how did I dare? My Mentor. My Mother.
My mother gave me the power to play. Even while she was cringing at my choice of job, certainly in the early 90’s when poker was not on TV, when the glamour and celebrity attached to the game now was not even a whisper of a thought, you could not have expected my mother – a women raised in the traditions of the 50’s – to be completely on board right away.
But it was the way she had raised me that allowed me to dare to make that choice, and the way she raised me was the true mentorship.
I grew up in a household where competition thrived. As a family, we interacted through games: hearts, gin, scrabble, bridge. In my house, I was allowed, encouraged, as a girl growing up to want to and to strive to win.
And I wanted to win badly.
My mother taught me that it was okay for a girl to want to win. My mother, who had the quickest mind and sharpest intellect of anyone I have ever known or, surely, will know, taught me that if you put your mind to it you can do anything. She taught me that the pursuit of knowledge is the goal in life, second only to having good relationships. She taught me that the differences among us should be celebrated not hidden.
How could I not dare to become a poker player with her as a mentor?
So as we ask ourselves, “How do we bring more women into the game and, in general, more players to the game?” My mother has truly given us the answer.
Mentorship.
When I first started playing at the World Series of Poker, players like Barbara Enright and Linda Johnson acted as my mentors. I am sure they didn’t know it then and, may not have known it until now, but to see their example, the example of women competing toe to toe in the open events, capturing open bracelets, this was such an important example to me. They demonstrated that women can do it, can be competitive at the uppermost levels of the game.
And when televised poker boomed, a broader audience of women everywhere had the same opportunity that I did to see women competing at the elite levels: Women like Jennifer Harman, Kathy Leibert, Kristy Gazes, Cyndy Violette and more, women competing on television and winning. Winning bracelets and championships. What an amazing opportunity that presented to show women the path, to give women the confidence to dare to compete. To redefine this great game as game for everyone – not just a game for the stereotypical old, cigar chomping, baseball hat wearing man.
And as poker’s popularity grew, the opportunity to mentor in a more meaningful way, in a more personal way, in a way that would give women the tools and knowledge to compete at the game, presented itself through camps like the WPT Bootcamp and the WSOP Academy. As my mother taught me so well, knowledge is the most powerful weapon you can possess. Having the opportunity to give to others what my mother gave to me through my work with the WSOP Academy is a gift that only the poker boom could have given me.
Poker has provided me with an amazing life and having a platform to pass on what I know about the game through teaching seminars or through my book, Decide to Play Great Poker, is something I could have never imagined back in that smoky room playing $10/$20 limit poker in Billings, Montana. I feel that every time I teach someone to play I honor my Mother and my other mentors, including and most significantly, of course, my brother.
I have no doubt that each of you feels the same way when you pass on your knowledge of this great game.
And this year I had the honor of having taught the winner of the Ladies Event at the World Series of Poker, Marsha Wolak. It is such a pleasure, a gift really, to see the fruits of my mentorship culminate in such a grand way. Congratulations to Marsha.
Today, I have a new mentor, Jeffrey Pollack. I truly believe that Jeffrey will be known as the individual most responsible for the modernization of the game of poker. I have been lucky to call him a friend for many years and, now, I am even luckier to call him a mentor as I embark with him and our partners on what I would consider a daring mission, to professionalize poker and to celebrate the great players in this game in the same way the elite are celebrated in other sports.
In every other sport, there is a forum for the best to play the best, and until now poker has been sorely missing that outlet. It is certainly the case that in other games like golf and tennis that anyone can play. My 72 year old father is still out there competing several times a week on tennis court. But just because anyone can play doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a forum where objectively the best in the world compete against each other. That is certainly the case in golf and tennis. Basketball and football. Even snowboarding and skateboarding.
So why has this forum been missing in poker?
We have set out to create this forum with the launch of The Epic Poker League. We have referred to Epic as the PGA of Poker and that is certainly what we are striving to achieve. As I stand on this new side of the felt, I am lucky to have a mentor like Jeffrey Pollack helping me through the process as we work to develop a new kind of relationship between the players and the tournaments in which they play, as we work to redefine what it means to watch poker on TV in the post Black Friday Era.
I am proud to say that at Epic we have some of the most incredible women in the industry on our team: Our Vice President of Programming + League Operations, Kat Kowal. Our Director of Player Relations, Joanne Priam. And our Vice President of Marketing, Amalia Rosen. These are all incredible, powerful women who I am honored to be working with and learning from every day.
And of course, we have several female league members, including both the more familiar faces to the viewing public and the young phenomenal players that have recently burst on the scene. Jennifer Harman, Kathy Leibert, Annette Obrestaad, Vanessa Rousso, Sandra Noujoks, JJ Liu, and Vanessa Selbst have all qualified and are representing both the old guard and new guard so well.
It is so exciting for me, as someone who has been around for so long, to see a new crop of incredibly talented female players emerge, players who are consistently in the top 50 in the world.
But even so, there are only 7 female league members amounting to just 3% of the League roster. When I started playing the WSOP Main Event back in 1994 about 3% of the field was comprised of women. This year? About 3% of the field was comprised of women. So while the absolute numbers of women playing the game has certainly grown during the poker boom, the percentage of women playing has not. When you consider the fact that over 30% of all poker TV viewers are women – I know we can do better.
So how do we get more women to play? I truly believe that we have a responsibility as women who have successfully found their place in this game to mentor young women, to provide them with the same confidence and belief that your intellect is your greatest weapon that my mother gave to me. When I started playing, I could never have imagined a future where a woman, particularly me, would be in the role of commissioner of anything.
But the future is here.
To be able to work to redefine what it means to be a professional poker player, to be able to work to redefine the relationship between the fans and the players, to be able to work to redefine what televised poker is such an honor, such a privilege, and I can only hope to rise to the challenge the way my mother would have expected me to.
I would like to challenge each and every one of you tonight to follow in my mother’s footsteps.
On the personal level, consider becoming a mentor, to take another female player under your wing, teach her, encourage her and nurture her.
As a group, let’s work toward finally breaking that 3% number. There are a lot of people in this room with a lot of reach. So I put this challenge to this room. Next year, on the weekend of the Ladies Event, let’s organize our constituencies to play not only the Ladies Event but the open $1,000 event that same weekend. If we organize and plan in advance, and everyone unfortunate enough to get knocked out of the Ladies Event would enter the $1,000 WSOP Event, we could easily create an open event where close to 50% of the field would be comprised of women. This is would be unheard of and unprecedented. What better weekend to do it than when the entire community is in town playing the Ladies Event already?
Imagine the statement this would make. We have arrived and we are here to stay.
Let’s break that 3% both at Epic and the WSOP. Let’s set a goal of 10% within the next 3 years. Is it ambitious? Yes. But I think we can do it if we just believe in the power of our own minds.
If we believe in the force of our collective will.
Let’s make my mother proud!
Hi,
I am from Billings,played poker here too!
The live card rooms are again, the problem with online poker.
Take care,
Mary
I agree! I understand what you are talking about not just as a Poker Player…I agree AS A MOM!!!!
What a great speech Annie, your mom would be proud.
I took your Epic Poker Training back in December 2011 at the Palms and learned so much from you and your book.
Just this week I came in Second at the Women’s Poker Classic at Cascades Casino in Langley BC and won a seat to the WSOP women’s event as well + plenty of $$$$
I would also like to play in at least one mixed event so please let me know which event your planning to get a group of women to attend in greater #’S and I will pass this info on to some of the other women players I know.
Thanks for being my mentor for a day at your camp. My goal is to play in your Epic Poker League sometime in the future. I came close to Winning a seat in one of your satellites already so I’m hopefull about being there in the future.
Your a great teacher and I loved every minute of your seminar.
Thanks Again
Louise Jean