Look around any tournament poker room and what will you see? For the most part, it is a “sausage fest” (be careful looking that one up on Google!), nothing but men at the tables filling the room with levels of testosterone that are difficult to miss. Thus, the performance of two women in high profile tournaments at the 2018 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure has drawn some notice.
In one of the early preliminary tournaments on the 2018 PCA calendar, the PokerStars National Championship (not sure whether we were talking about the States of America or the Bahamas, the host country for the PCA) featured a field of 290 players who put their $1650 on the line for glory. After three days of battle, the final table featured several top professionals, all of whom would be worthy champions of the event. Chris Moorman, Ryan Smith, and Harrison Gimbel were all poised to take their shots at the title.
Atop the leaderboard, however, was a person that many didn’t give a shot at winning. Maria Konnikova, a psychology PhD who has written extensively regarding, well, why people do what they do. Her book The Confidence Game made the New York Times best seller list and brought quite a bit of renown to Konnikova as to how the current President of the United States was able to “con” his way to the office, among other things. One of those was a year-long assignment in an area she had little to no experience: tournament poker.
Konnikova took it quite seriously. She has picked up a person who might be an OK coach, eight-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and Poker Hall of Famer Erik Seidel, to serve in that position as she goes through her year in the world of poker that will run through this year’s WSOP. No one, however, thought she would be in second place on the eight-handed final table when it went off for the 2018 PCA National Championship.
The Russian-American writer proved that she was no slouch as she stormed through the final table. She was able to eliminate Smith in sixth place to leap into the lead and rode that through to meet Alexander Ziskin in heads up play holding about a 4:1 lead. Rather quickly, Konnikova was able to defeat Ziskin to capture the $84,600 first place prize, a Platinum Pass good for a seat at the inaugural PokerStars Players No Limit Hold’em Champions (otherwise known as the PSPC), and the knowledge that she isn’t going to be sneaking up on anyone anymore!
Konnikova’s achievements in the PCA National Championship weren’t the only bright moments for the ladies. In the $10,000 Main Event, 571 players turned out to make for a $5.645 million prize pool, much more than the $3.376 million that was generated in 2017 when the tournament was a $5000 buy in. And, from the start, the ladies made their games known to those in the Atlantis tournament room.
Liv Boeree was a lady who drove deep into the event, falling only to a cooler and to the other woman left in the field. On Day 4 and on one of the last hands of the night, Boeree got into a battle with Maria Lampropulos, with the eventual outcome being that the remainder of Boeree’s chips hit the center of the felt. Boeree called what was coming as she turned up her cards and, unfortunately, she was right; Boeree’s pocket Queens were up against Lampropulos’ pocket Kings and, in a battle of the ladies, no other ladies would show up on the A-J-J-7-A board, giving Lampropulos the hand and sending Boeree out in 17th place.
Lampropulos would use that hand to catapult her to the top of the leaderboard at the final table a day later. Sitting in third on the penultimate day of action, Lampropulos would go into heads up play against the tough Shawn Buchanan at a 2:1 disadvantage. She would quickly double twice in two consecutive hands to seize the lead, however, and would eventually take down the former World Poker Tour champion to become the first woman to win the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event and take the $1,081,100 first prize.
The achievements by Konnikova and Lampropulos are remarkable for any player but especially so for female players. In 2017, Lampropulos was the highest ranking female player on the CardPlayer Player of the Year board, but she was way down the list in 85th place and there wasn’t another lady in the Top 100. On the Global Poker Index, the top lady was Kristen Bicknell in 49th place, while Lampropulos could only make it as high as #152.
Perhaps it is a signal of changing times with poker the finishes of Konnikova and Lampropulos. Then again, it may just be a statistical occurrence that will even out over the run of the rest of the year (women roughly make up 3-5% of tournament fields, especially those at the World Series of Poker). Still, the achievements of these two ladies is noteworthy in a field dominated by men.
