With these discussions usually comes a certain vagueness because there have rarely been major tournament series in which the number of female players was tracked. Estimates are usually given as three to five percent in any given tournament, but numbers vary and have no statistical basis. The WSOP decided to change that this year, as most events are listing the number of women in each field. It seems only fair, considering countries have been denoted for years in most tournaments. And with gender in poker an ongoing hot topic, the decision to make the numbers public is a smart one.

In the history of the WSOP, only 15 women have won open events that welcome all players of legal age. The first was Starla Brodie in 1979, who won a doubles event with Doyle Brunson. Vera Richmond won an A-5 draw event in 1982, followed by Donna Doman in 1983 who won a doubles tournament. Barbara Enright won a PLHE event in 1996. In 1997, two women won open events: Maria Stern for 7-card stud and Linda Johnson for razz. That happened again in 2000 when Jerry Thomas won a 7-card stud tournament and Jennifer Harman won 2-7 draw. Nani Dollison won a LHE event in 2001, and Harman took a LHE title in 2002. There were three female champions in 2004, as Annie Duke won Omaha-8, Kathy Liebert won a LHE shootout, and Cyndy Violette won a stud-8 event. Another win happened in 2007 when Katja Thater won a razz bracelet, and Annette Obrestad took the WSOP Europe Main Event title that fall. Vanessa Selbst won a bracelet in PLO in 2008.

Whew! Got that?

A forum topic on 2+2 started by CKBWOP pointed out that those last six victories came after the 2003 poker boom spurred by Chris Moneymaker, and she pointed out that there were 342 tournaments during those seven years of 2004 to 2010. Her math concluded that those numbers reflected that only two percent of the fields were women.

With the estimate that only two percent of the 2011 WSOP fields would be female, she determined that women should win 1.2 bracelets this year. If the percentage of women in the fields is higher, women have an even better chance of grabbing the gold.

Why the thread full of analysis? Pro poker player Brandon Adams made a bet this year prior to the start of the WSOP. He bet even money that a woman would win a bracelet this year, and friends rushed to make the bet, assuming it was an easy money wager because Brandon was wrong. Brandon, on the other hand, explained that his intuition told him that women are “more rationally risk-averse in the money but they are also more likely than men to steer towards their best events.” He also added that people who bet against him are likely to “disregard unknown females in a way that they would never disregard unknown males.”

As the WSOP got underway, there were initial numbers given by Nolan Dalla as follows:

Event 2: $25K NLHE Heads-Up Championship - 4 women/128 total players (3.13%)

Event 3: $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo - 36 women/925 total players (3.89%)

Not all events provided the number of women, but others did. For example:

Event 8: $1,000 NLHE - 172 women/4,178 total players (4.1%)

And Seth Palansky of the WSOP reported that the total of women in the first nine events, which included the employees-only event, boasted of 391 female players and 8,108 males. Women made up 4.6 percent of the cumulative fields at that point.

It should be noted that one woman, Maria Ho, just missed her shot at a bracelet in Event 4 when she finished in second place for $540,020, which was incidentally the second highest cash for a woman in WSOP history.

In general, this sort of data will be useful. Should the WSOP release overall statistics of women in each event and at the overall Series, and continue the trend going forward, the poker community can begin documenting the data. Poker entities can use it to determine marketing methods for women to attract them to the tables, and further analysis can be provided by poker media.

Whether or not this is important to many players or in the general scheme of the poker world is up to each individual. If you’d like this statistic to be tracked, write to tournament organizers for WSOP, WPT, EPT, and others to let them know.

See also He Said: Women’s Participation at the WSOP