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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

Mar 25, 2006

The Real Reason Women Don't Win at Poker

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

It seems every time I read an article about a woman winning a major tournament, finishing at the final table, or making a living as a professional poker player or losing, there's always some kind of caveat.

Most of the time the statement is something about women competing in a man's game. There's talk about women not being as competitive, not having that testosterone driven need to decimate one another, not understanding that it's okay to lie and cheat and even steal.

Bull!

While the number of women getting involved in poker has increased and while they are making a mark, they still aren't achieving great tournament success - and this seems to be how we rank whether or not a person is a winner. The real reason this winning thing doesn't happen faster and more often has nothing to do with being surrounded and intimidated by men or the feminine inability to spit. That's just some kind of semi-lie that's become an urban legend.

The real reason women haven't excelled in poker is easy to understand when you think of what's emphasized in schools and often in homes.

I came across this amazing discovery while going through some files of newspaper clippings I'd saved as part of research I had been doing for an article. One of the pages contained an article by syndicated financial columnist Humberto Cruz and as soon as I read the headline, I knew!

I knew I had found the real reason that women haven't become more prominent in poker.

The article was titled, "Math anxiety plagues many money decisions."

Cruz proudly proclaimed to his wife that he had quickly solved a puzzle in his Sunday paper only to see her lose her cool.

The puzzle was simply to determine how fast a man could run based on this information: A train is traveling at 90 miles per hour while the man walking over the railroad bridge that spanned a river was seven-tenths of the way across. He didn't know which way the train was heading but he did have time to run to either end of the bridge and get off just before the train hit him.

Mrs. Cruz responded with something like "Who cares?" Actually, she said, "It's infuriating because it's irrelevant and absurd."

You go, girl. That's what I have to say to Mrs. Cruz because I couldn't figure out the puzzle. At first it really ticked me off that Cruz didn't give the answer or tell anyone how to figure it out and suddenly I realized I really didn't care! I was never going to be seven-tenths of the way across a bridge anyway, train or no train. And if that silly fool wanted to risk getting run over by the train, so be it.

When my first and second-year teacher gave math lessons, she did it in a way that meant something.

"Okay, children. Let's say you start today and pick one apple every day and put it in the refrigerator. On Sunday, you take the apples out and put them in a basket to take to your grandmother. How many apples are you going to give her?"

Now that I understood. I had an apple tree, there was a refrigerator in our kitchen, and my grandmother loved apples.

When our high-school math teacher started giving out problems about a train traveling east at 100 miles per hour and leaving Sacramento at 7 a.m. while a train traveling 120 miles an hour was leaving New York, and wanting to know when how long it would be before they hit each other, I was gone.

The only train in the entire area that I called home was one that carried coal from the mines to the refineries and they went so slow every kid in town could jump on the caboose and have a great ride.

So this is where many of us - boys too - took a vacation from math and some never returned.

How silly of us not to realize this earlier. If we're playing a game that requires us to know math, how can we expect to come out ahead?

Funny thing about math that while it seems some people have a natural proclivity for the subject, the reality is that something about it caught their attention and whet their appetite. And those who are attracted to it often go on to study it in some degree or another. Kathy Liebert, for example, earned a degree in business and finance. (And it was Humberto Cruz who said, "Those with low 'math comfort,' mostly women, tend to be afraid of making financial decisions ....")

And if the successful women didn't learn to play poker as emerging teenagers (Jennifer Harman and Susie Isaacs, for example), they were poker and blackjack dealers (Linda Davis, Cindy Violette).

All that being said, please remember that while poker is a game that replicates the battle for survival of the fittest, math skills alone will not get you to the top of the heap on a regular basis.

Knowing how to figure the buzz words such as "pot committed," and "pot odds," and "outs" can go only as far as the next card to hit the table. When you're all in, your pocket threes against ace-king is hands down an underdog. It doesn't take math skills to realize that any ace or any king on the flop, turn or river will beat those threes. So when the flop brings an ace, the threes look very puny indeed. Once again, math skills don't come into play. But if the next card off the deck is a three, your set looks strong. Now it's all up to the river.

Like the puzzle about the guy on the bridge with the train about to squash him, we don't need to answer anything more here.

What we have to know is that math skills will go a long, long way in helping us become better poker players especially in live (non tournament) action. We have to know that we can get by without them but in the long run, but we'll be better off with them.

As in the example of those pocket treys, much of tournament success depends on luck - and so far, math and luck haven't touched each other's hearts as yet. But, if you're in live action with those threes, math skills will help you decide what to do with them.

Still, it's nothing to worry about ladies, because this man/woman/math disparity won't last. A global survey (Dec. 2004) of math skills shows that all American students rank 27th in real-life math skills out of the 29 richest countries in the world that were surveyed. Everybody's going to have to watch out for those Finns and South Koreans who pulled the best scores.