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What Did Poker Sites Do to Celebrate IWD 2022?

Written by Jennifer Newell
Last updated on
Jennifer Newell

For many years, International Women’s Day was one day in a year that some online poker sites offered a special tournament or spotlighted their female sponsored pro.

In recent years, things have begun to change. There are more women in poker, and many of those women speak up. Their collective voices become louder. Their influence grows. They demand better.

In this day and age, if a poker site counts only one woman on its roster of team pros, women notice, speak up, call out that site for a lack of proper representation. If a poker site does nothing to even acknowledge International Women’s Day, women notice, speak up, and call it out.

Today, there are more than a few groups and organizations dedicated to women in poker. With thousands of members in each – and one aiming to reach one million members this year – it is only a matter of time before those women hit the live poker tables in bigger numbers. Many card rooms are already noticing more women in the cash games and daily tournaments. And bigger live tournaments may see an uptick in female participation as well.

Let this 2022 IWD signal the start of even louder voices and even more influence in the poker world.

Acknowledgements of IWD

Speaking of those poker sites doing nothing for International Women’s Day, let’s talk about that.

Partypoker did nothing and didn’t mention anything on social media. In addition, its list of ambassadors and Twitch streamers now includes no women.

888poker did nothing and didn’t mention anything on social media. However, it has long maintained a roster of team pros that is fifty percent or more female. The current lineup is: Kara Scott, Vivian Saliba, Dominik Nitsche, Samantha Abernathy, and Carl Eubank Jr.

Winamax, same, but its lineup of 15 team pros does feature two women – Leo Margets and Gaelle Baumann.

Unibet Poker, same, but of four sponsored pros, Monica Eilertsen Vaka is one of them. And Dara O’Kearney and David Lappin are very outspoken proponents of equality in poker.

PokerStars always produces thoughtful blog posts for IWD, and this one was no different. It worked through a detailed timeline of prominent women in poker and accomplishments by women in the game, dating back to 1865.

PokerStars also announced that it would add something extra to its weekly Women’s Sunday tournament. The March 13 edition will feature an EPT Monte Carlo Main Event prize package for the winner, France Poker Series prize package for the runner-up, and live event qualifier tickets for the top 20 finishers. All in all, that adds up to €11,500 in extra prizes.

In addition, PokerStars continues to use its Our Voices community to take feedback from women in poker and offer surveys to gauge women’s opinions on various poker-related topics. They also published new interviews with Ambassadors Jen Shahade and Georgina “GJReggie” James.

Winning Poker Network

WPN’s flagship poker site, Americas Cardroom, has been improving its outreach to women in the past several years. Its roster of Team ACR pros includes 13 people, three of whom are women – Ebony Kenney, Katie Lindsay, and Ana Marquez. Vanessa Kade was also a member of the team until last month, when she stepped down citing “similar ongoing issues” related to inappropriate behavior of some kind from someone. Details remain to be revealed.

ACR ran a special IWD tournament on the night of March 8. The $55 buy-in event offered a $20K guarantee. Kenney participated and hosted on her livestream (Lindsay was in the Wynn Millions and Marquez at EPT Prague), and she welcomed guests Lynne Ji, Trishelle Cannatella, and Shanna Moakler, each of whom carried bounties of $215 Million Dollar Sunday tickets.

Male pros got in on the promotion of the tournament, with several of them awarding free entries into the $55 tournament that night.

Ultimately, the tournament attracted 503 entries and set the prize pool at $25,150. It paid the top 72 finishers and saved $4,715.84 for the winner.

GGPoker in a Category by Itself

On the positive side, GGPoker has continued to support the Fantastic Ladies in Poker (FLIP) with fairly regular freerolls and tournaments. Leading up to International Women’s Day, GGPoker hosted daily freerolls for FLIP from March 1-7. After awarding about $1,500 in tournament tickets, it culminated in the IWD Bounty Celebration on March 8. The tournament required a ticket of $25 to buy in and offered a $50K guarantee on the prize pool. The PKO tournament also picked ten women in the tournament on whom they placed $150 tickets to the March 29 GGMasters $5M GTD event. It ended up with 2,322 entries.

On the day before IWD and the tournament, it posted this video on Twitter.

That was lovely…except famous misogynistic and generally gross Dan Bilzerian remained on GGPoker’s website as one of its elite Global Team pros.

Bilzerian probably initially sent some new registrants to GGPoker from his fan-boy following, but he didn’t do much from that point forward. His face was attached to some promotions, but he flaked on one of his original commitments to play the winner of his own birthday freeroll. Apparently, he didn’t have the courage to play the winner Alex O’Brien…who was a woman. Needless to say, Bilzerian did nothing to be called an ambassador for poker.

Besides that, Bilzerian was still tweeting his words of wisdom to his 1.6M followers, like these gems:

And then, suddenly, on International Women’s Day (about 15 months after signing Bilzerian as an ambassador), GGPoker removed all signs of him from its website. Pokerfuse noticed. GGPoker refused to comment.

So, on IWD, GGPoker disassociated Bilzerian from its brand….and made no statement about it. No one was particularly impressed.

GGPoker has tried to repair its Bilzerian-associated reputation, but nothing goes quite as far as an apology. The poker community – especially the women in it – deserve no less.

 

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