Foxen Makes Historic Run as Fewer Women Play WSOP Main Event
Let’s do the good news first.
As the 2024 World Series of Poker Main Event heads into Day 9 on Sunday, July 14, one woman stands tall among the final 18 players. And poker players know this woman, as Kristen Foxen (formerly Kristen Bicknell) is an accomplished player in the game.
Foxen as a Player
That’s a bit of an understatement, to be honest, to put Foxen into the “accomplished” category.
She has earned more than $7.7M in live poker tournaments throughout her career and ranks 13th of all Canadian poker players…ever. She has four WSOP gold bracelets to her name, as well as titles from World Poker Tour (WPT) series and European Poker Tour (EPT) series. In the high-stakes realm of high roller tournaments, she won an Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) High Roller event, and she has claimed titles on the PokerGO Tour such as the PGT Kickoff and Poker Masters, not to mention an Aria Summer High Roller title.
For four of the last five years, Foxen has won the GPI Female Player of the Year award, leading the global women’s rankings so often that it’s no longer a surprise when she wins.
While she is grateful for the GPI awards, Foxen is conflicted about it. She has noted on many occasions that she does not want to be the best female player in the world but THE best player in the world. She is not fond of separating women into their own rankings list. When she accepted her most recent GPI Female POY award, she said, in part:
“To me, one of the greatest aspects of poker is the fact that everyone is competing on a completely even and equal playing field. Size, gender, or age doesn’t matter. As a 20-year-old girl, I actually felt empowered sitting at a poker table amongst businessmen and other poker pros, knowing that the only thing that could stop me from taking their money was their poker ability. …
“The idea of separating men and women when it comes to poker in any capacity is something that I don’t like to encourage. With that being said, recognizing the success of women in poker will hopefully highlight the fair playing field and encourage other women to feel comfortable playing, with confidence, this unbiased great game.”
In short, Foxen wants to celebrate women in the game. In fact, one of her WSOP bracelets – her first one – was the WSOP Ladies Championship event in 2013. However, her feelings about gender barriers in poker, or the lack thereof, has evolved over time to her current conflicted views. She is not fond of the “last woman standing” moniker when she is the last woman in a tournament, and she avoids talking about her successes as a woman rather than as a player in general. She is not alone in her feelings but has been in a position to be more outspoken than others with those views.
Without using that disliked moniker, then, we can simply say that Kristen Foxen is someone with whom many women can identify and is running deep in the 2024 WSOP Main Event.
Speaking of Women in the Main Event…
It’s time for the bad news.
The number of women in the Main Event this year was down, as was the percentage of women in the field as a whole.
The WSOP itself didn’t respond to my request for the gender breakdown of the 2024 Main Event, but PokerGO did provide that information on its livestream. There were 358 women registered in the tournament this year, which represented only 3.54% of the total field of 10,112 players. Not only was the number of women down 37 players from last year while total entries increased, women’s representation in the field was the lowest in more than a decade.
For reference, here are the numbers in chart form:
There are some caveats to this.
- Many women who get into poker would rather spend $10K of their bankroll on multiple lower buy-in events than one $10K buy-in tournament.
- Many women in poker go to Las Vegas for Ladies Week (or Ladies Poker Summer Camp) to play in various women-only tournaments rather than open events.
- It is more difficult for many women to be away from families for two weeks to play a single tournament than it is – traditionally – for men.
- The WSOP does not provide gender breakdowns for any other tournament, so this is the only marker available for women in open events at the WSOP.
- The WSOP does not reveal how it classifies women and men, nor if there are any players who do not fall into those two categories.
It would be beneficial to compare WSOP Main Event attendance to any other open tournaments, but the data is not available. No tournament organizer or casino provides this information for events, much less on a regular basis for comparison analysis.
Feature photo credit: Danny Maxwell for PokerNews/WSOP 2024
