One Small Step for Womankind

Tonight, a woman named Annie Duke won the World Poker Series Tournament of Champions. To clarify, this was not a woman's tournament--she was playing with the big boys and beat out a lot of top contenders and former World Series of Poker winners, including her brother, Howard Lederer, who was at the final table with her. Am I wrong to feel vicariously triumphant? The funny thing is, I wasn't even rooting for her at first, mostly because I like Howard and wanted him to win. But as the tournament progressed, and she kept hanging in there, I started to notice some stuff that gave me pause. Some of the announcers' comments, for one thing, were really kind of outrageous but not surprising. "Annie's feeling a lot of emotion right now," one of the commentators said at one point. Of course, she's a woman, so she's going to be emotional--that's such a girl thing, after all. At another point, one of them actually said, and I quote, "First we gave them (women) the right to vote, then we put them on the Supreme Court, now we're letting them play poker . . . when will it end?" Ha, ha. It was meant to be a joke--and isn't it just hilarious? Can you imagine if he'd said the same thing, but in reference to African Americans, or Asians, or any other group besides women? Yeah, that would have been really funny . . . possibly lawsuit-level funny.

At any rate, I was proud of Annie and very happy that she won. She was awesome, actually. And an interesting thing to consider--I doubt very much that her final heads-up opponent, Phil Helmuth (or, as Jackspatula calls him, Phil Hellmouth), was thinking much at the end about her being a woman. He was just thinking about how to beat her, and he failed. (And then bitched about it incessantly, but that's just him--he's kind of an asshole.) I have experienced that myself, actually, albeit under more modest and mundane circumstances. I too have sat at a card table full of men for up to eight hours, in Vegas, multiple times. And the same thing always happens. At first there is some joking, some flirting, a lot of not-taking-me-seriously. Then, as I continue to sit there, and win sometimes, and neglect to respond to the flirting and the chit-chat, eventually I am just another player at the table, and the whole woman thing kind of fades away. Maybe that's why I love playing cards so much--it is a great leveler. Ditto pool and chess, two of my other great loves. If you know what you're doing, nothing else about you--gender, race, physical ability--matters at all. And you can compete. And you can win.

Congratulations, Annie!!