The Biology and Eros of No-Limit Hold'em Tournaments

The woman with five hearts knew what she had,

knew what we lacked. She bet high and then

higher; it was what any of us would have done.

- Stephen Dunn



The winner of every open World Series of Poker event in 2005 and 2006 was a man, as were all 18 final-table players in the championship events. The 2007 razz event was won by Katja Thater, and the no-limit hold'em event in London by 18-year-old phenom "Annette_15" Obrestad. Every other 2007 bracelet went to a man, as did the top 36 spots in the main event. Jennifer Harman, Cyndy Violette, Kathy Liebert, Annie Duke, and Nani Dollison have also won bracelets; they and a few dozen other women, including Millie Shiu, Erica Schoenberg, and Anna Wroblewski, make handsome livings at poker. Harman, in fact, more than holds her own every night in Bobby's Room at Bellagio, home of the toughest ring game on the planet. Even so, a woman has yet to win the WSOP main event; only Barbara Enright, who finished fifth in 1995, has made a final table. Nor has a woman won a single World Poker Tour event.



The game played in almost every major tournament is no-limit hold'em, the form that most consistently rewards an aggressive approach. The leverage it provides to win pots without the best hand gives forceful risk-takers a significant edge. These bullying small-ball artists will make or call a modest preflop raise with just about any two cards, aiming to bust the rocks – male or female – who patiently wait for big pairs. Even when the flop misses the bully's hand, he often proceeds on the assumption that it missed the rock's, too, and attacks with a sizable bet. This risky approach, combined with good luck, is how J.C. Tran, Bill Edler, and David Pham have been dominating tournaments in 2007. It's the same approach that wins every year.



The biggest obstacle keeping more women from the top of the Card Player Player of the Year (POY) leader board is neither skill nor the need to be aggressive, but the fact that too few of them choose to compete in the major events. Those fields very seldom consist of more than 5 percent women, and you've got to be in it to win it. Tournament-style gambling, however, isn't something the average woman is biologically inclined to sign up for.



In a 2005 University of Pittsburgh study, women did just as well as men, both individually and on four-member teams, in a math game that paid $2 for each correct answer. But when offered the chance to either consolidate their profits or risk them in a tournament with much more at stake, most women declined to compete, even the ones who had previously done best in the game. Most men chose to enter the tournament, even those who had fared poorly earlier.



"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," one female researcher concluded. "The men who weren't good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won."



Anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior, writes: "Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy, because those males get more reproductive opportunities," said Fisher. "Women don't get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top."



This anti-competitive bias might be an even bigger impediment to entering poker tournaments, because money not only flows to the top of a pyramid of risk-takers, but is the game's very language. Aggressively competing for it might simply feel too unladylike for many women, even in 2007.



Balancing this bias, perhaps, is the fact that poker also rewards patience and what is called women's intuition, the empathetic ability to read what others are thinking or feeling. There are plenty of aggressive women, of course, in poker and other arenas, as well as patient, intuitive men. Yet the fact that men produce about 20 times as much testosterone, a hormone closely linked with both stamina and competitiveness, probably makes it easier for them to stay aggressive for the week or longer that it takes to win a major no-limit event.



Age is also a factor. Testy young males not only love tournament action, they have, or make, time for it. As a group they have fewer family responsibilities than women, or than men over, say, 35. Young men might also be better able to cope with the physical toll of traveling from event to event.



While Danica Patrick, Kerri Walsh, Michelle Wie, and others have proved that women can compete against men in some physical sports, pokeristas are closer to achieving parity and should get even closer as reinforcements arrive. Women already comprise roughly a quarter of Internet players. Anxiety about competing is presumably less of a factor online, even though intuition is thwarted. But as women learn the game in small buy-in virtual tournaments, more might be willing to risk part of their bankroll in lucrative on-land events.



Then there is what might be called the eros of no-limit hold'em, and all of its pluses and drawbacks. Poker players in general often report the game to be more stimulating than amphetamines, alcohol, or even sexual intercourse. When all of our money goes into the pot, electrons and corpuscles rush to the pleasure centers of the cerebral cortex, and others rush lower. To modulate our breathing becomes a pivotal challenge. We blush.



A 2006 television commercial for Kimono condoms was designed to capitalize on the newfound sex appeal of no-limit hold'em. The manufacturer emphasizes "socially responsible health care" on its Web site, MayerLabs.com, from which the ad can be downloaded. "Poker is fun, tense and exciting," Mayer explains, "just like sexual relationships. Smart, fun people who like sex, like safer sex, and they like it more with Kimono."



Cut to a beautiful woman betting all of her chips against a dangerously handsome stud sitting behind a big stack. Making meaningful eye contact, the stud calls her bet and raises one chip. Unpregnant pause. With no chips left, the woman tosses a Kimono condom – still in its wrapper, of course – toward the pot. Nudge nudge, know what I mean, say no more, as Eric Idle might comment. As three schlubs look on, the stud shoves the rest of his chips in. Packs of Kimono condoms appear on the screen, with the tag line: "When the Stakes are High."



Wink.



No doubt some women will resent, or at least regret, this ad's innuendo. Others will smile, maybe blush. Still others will nod at its accurate reflection of poker's racy ethos and jargon. Extortionate reraises, after all, have long been called "coming over the top" of the initial bettor, often abbreviated to, simply, coming. To come nearly always requires pushing in all of your chips.



This isn't to deny that all of the sparsely clad bimbos posing in ads for online poker sites is an unfortunate, if predictable, trend. At the very least, we should ask ourselves how the Kimono spot would read if the man, with nothing left to bet but a condom, was facing a woman with a – wink – oversize stack. As the old poker Freudian slip goes, "She's got a full blouse – I mean, house."



One response to such innuendos appeared in an ad for Interpoker.com in Woman Poker Player. "Weaker sex? I don't think so!" it declares as a blonde in a camisole confidently fingers her holecards while sitting behind a big stack. "Men," snorts the copy below. "Simple creatures, aren't they? A flutter of your eyes, a flash of leg and they're easily distracted. Well, now it's time to take that female advantage to the poker tables and relieve them of some cash!"



The siren's m.o. is also endorsed by Toby Leah Bochan in The Badass Girl's Guide to Poker. Don't just take men's money, says Bochan. Romance them! In Chapter 13, "Lucky at Cards, Lucky in Love: Meeting Men Through Poker," the newly single author admits: "Being hetero, it wasn't like my all-female book club was crowded with possibilities." She recommends that women take advantage of the doubly improved dating odds of late-night action, since more men than women play poker and more single than married men stay out past midnight. Yet whatever the hour, the game provides natural ice-breakers. "The mood is energized – there's money at stake," Bochan writes. "And it's easy to tease as you raise and flash a coy smile as you call. Flirting goes with poker like ice cream goes with pie – both are good on their own, but much more delicious together." Old-school feminists and demure pokeristas might try this Bochan line on for size: "I bet you're hiding something big in that pocket." Or not. Some of her less charming tactics come under the heading, "PMS anyone?" These include: "Revel in being a bitch. Smirk as you pull in pots – gloat. Yell when you suffer a bad beat." All sound like good ways to stay single.



The cards themselves have long represented gender-based stratagems. One 16th-century Swiss deck had snarling lions atop its hierarchy, followed in descending order by haughty kings, ravishing ladies, soldiers in breastplates and helmets, then bare-breasted dancing girls. On Renaissance Florentine decks, the ladies and dancers were naked.



Queens may be clad now and dancing girls chastened to tens, but the modern poker deck continues to represent ancient erotic priorities. Kings, queens, jacks, and "tens" still combine with themselves and the other cards in untold, and unfair, variations. Exactly why should a set of jacks, for example, beat an equally rare set of tens? Yet poker's recombinant totem pole, based as it is on mathematical scarcity, the sequence of Arabic numbers, and the sexual politics of European royalty, somehow feels right in our marrow.



In Sociobiolgy, Edward O. Wilson writes: "The more intelligent and social the species, the more elaborate the play." He notes that when playing or pair-bonding, it is "possible for hostile and submissive displays to be combined" to "create a message containing a high level of ambiguity"; the fearful but threatening posture of a Halloween cat, for example, or the end of the condom commercial, or Bochan's belligerent flirting. "By combining signals," writes Wilson, "it is possible to give them new meanings."



Nor should we be surprised when some cards pick up bawdy meanings. A hold'em starting hand of 2-9 is often called Twiggy, 3-8 Raquel Welch, 6-9 Big Lick, Q-Q Four Tits, A-Q Little Slick, and much worse. The queen of hearts continues to represent love, while her counterpart in spades remains the predatory, peremptory Bitch.



Gaming journalist David Spanier claimed in Total Poker that the game "has an intimate connection with sexual drives" before quoting psychoanalyst Ralph Greening on its procreative cadence: "There is a rhythm of tension-discharge, which is constantly repeated." Spanier even proposed that poker showdowns were equivalent in the unconscious to comparing penises with other men, although what a showdown might signify to a badass brunette becomes a little harder to say. But the game in Spanier's view certainly involves titillation. "Playing with poker chips, counting them out, stacking them up, the smooth shapes and glistening colors, the sensual pleasure of handling the cards … it's all of a piece." With what? Masturbation, he says, most often related to submissive or dominant urges. After making his case in more scholarly terms, he cites an unnamed bisexual friend who confided to him: "I got a huge erection when I was losing one night really heavily. … In a dreadful way it was pleasurable. But then when I managed to win some of the money back, the excitement faded." Though it does give new meaning to taking the good with the bad.



When the woman in the Kimono ad wagers that condom and the man calls all in, they are taking Wilson's and Spanier's and Bochan's ideas to their logical if naughty conclusion. Unfortunately, none of these commercials or bimbo-laced ad campaigns – not to mention such flagrantly adolescent sites as NakedPoker.com – are likely to encourage more women to enter more no-limit hold'em tournaments.



Harman, for one, is impatient. She recently told me that many women still seem intimidated by men at the table. After granting that women have made progress over the last decade, she added: "At this rate it'll be a couple hundred years before we're winning half the events."



Here's hoping she's off by a century and three-quarters or so. And surely when "Annette_15" turns 21 and becomes eligible to play in American tournaments, progress should greatly accelerate.