Annie Duke Issues 10% Challenge to Women Players

According to Team Pokerati local femme fave @LasVegasPokers, today is \”girls day\” in Las Vegas. Currently running is the Ladies event in the Caesars Palace Kickoff Classic (a $130 NL event) … and then at 7pm is a $105 Pink Ladies $1000 guarantee at the new Tropicana poker room. (Yay?)

Today is also the final table of the Epic Poker League\’s 8-handed NL event. No woman has yet to cash in an Epic event, save for maybe in a satellite to a $1,500 pro-am. In fact, only one woman two women entered this week\’s $20k Epic event (J.J. Liu and Vanessa Selbst) … and only one woman cracks the Global Poker Index\’s ranking of the top 150 players in the world (Vanessa Selbst #20). Not sure what that says about the only poker league run by a woman save for maybe Pink Ladies … but listen to Epic Commish Annie Duke\’s keynote address last week at the Women in Poker Hall of Fame ceremony, where she speaks to essentially the Vegas-to-LA power poker sister set — a potentially hostile audience considering Annie\’s public opposition to Ladies Events in the past.

CORRECTION: Vanessa Selbst also entered Epic\’s 8-handed event; she was one of the first players eliminated. ALSO: LIPS and HHPT are poker tours or leagues run by women.

MORE CORRECTIONS: Vanessa Selbst also cashed in the first Epic Pro-Am, making Epic a little less women-dry than suggested above.

To some extent, just the fact that she got the speaking gig suggests that the feminish poker elite were willing to give her a chance to bury whatever hatchets and re-introduce herself to some of the most active and influential women in poker. In doing so, she bemoaned a gender split for open-tournament participation that has been stuck at about 3 percent since the mid-90s … calls on reaching a new bar of 10 percent … and laid out her vision for an estrogen-wielding flash mob to descend on the open WSOP $1k event the same weekend as the WSOP Ladies Championship … creating an unprecedented gender-balanced open bracelet event, where showing up dressed like a man would presumably be optional.