Women play a starring role at the poker tables. Whether they are capturing mainstream attention at a live final table like Ana Marquez at WSOPE or enjoying online action in WCOOP without revealing their identities, the female contingent can never be discounted. And with PokerStars Women events to welcome more to the tables, the sky is the limit for the ladies ... and for poker in general.
Women's Tournaments
The weekly $11 Women's Tuesday offers players a chance for a $1K guarantee in a 6-max No Limit Hold'em tournament. The month of September added another set of winners to Super Tuesday history:
September 4: WSBilly55 (Canada) - $319.83
September 11: Elisamo (Germany) - $319.83
September 19: toni__pet (UK) - $286.00
September 23: Stella796 (Germany) - $301.60
The Women's Sunday is the big event of the week, offering the female players of PokerStars a $55 NLHE tournament with a $10K guarantee. Team PokerStars Pros also join in the action with $50 bounties on their heads.
Our September 23 winner, olechia, sees the Women's Sunday as a "great tournament in all respects." She is a Russian native living in Lithuania, and though her full-time job is working as a nurse at a hospital, she has played poker in her spare time for about five years. She plays the occasional medium-stakes Omaha cash games, but she prefers tournaments with fewer than 500 players, also enjoying the occasional SNG or heads-up challenge. Her strategy? Examine her opponents and use their mistakes against them, and remember that any two cards can win if played properly. It was a winning strategy for her!
Here are all of the results for the month of September:
September 2
Players: 210
Prize pool: $10,500
Winner: aouaou188 (Greece) - $2,147.25
September 9
Players: 211
Prize pool: $10,550
Winner: tktxrf (Russia) - $2,157.58
September 16
Players: 251
Prize pool: $12,550
Winner: sladost (Russia) - $2,566.58
September 23
Players: 224
Prize pool: $11,200
Winner: olechia (Lithuania) - $2,290.40
September 30
Players: 259
Prize pool: $12,950
Winner: coloccini20 (Finland) - $2,505.94
One of the players at the September 23 final table, katie75013, was a name we hadn't seen in a while. We reached out to her, and Katie Stone was happy to inform that she is a United States citizen who recently moved to Rosarito, Mexico, in order to return to the PokerStars tables. Online poker is where she's rooted, but there's more to it. "It's where I have had the most success in poker, and it's also the best way to become a better poker player. Online poker is where the best players are and is where the current trends in poker show up the most."
Her return to the Women's Sunday came on September 9, but her first final table from Mexico came on the 23rd. She incorporates Women's Sunday satellites into her weekly poker schedule and generally wins her seat that way. She also plays the Women's Poker League and tries to "play every single one." Playing with her experience, though, she typically grinds 15 or 16 tables at once and can easily incorporate women's events.
For Katie, the best thing about being back on PokerStars is feeling productive and back to improving her game. Live poker has downfalls, like the time they take and the slow bankroll swings, and the emotions that go with that. But online, "I play more tournaments in two days than I did in the entire last year!" She explained, "It's much easier to realize your edge, your skill, be able to withstand the variance, and keep your mental health and confidence all while constantly improving your game." In addition, "PS has really great hand history replay software, and this helps with quick replays while you are midsession to enable you to adjust to specific opponents."
Katie is part of a women's group of poker players called the Grindettes. She, along with Katie Dozier, Jen Shahade, and Jamie Kerstetter, learn from each other as they grind poker for a living. Dozier also now lives in Rosarito, and the two gather sometimes for the camaraderie that poker does often bring. The Grindettes experience allows them to share experiences of being female poker players while staying positive and being committed to poker. With Jamie expected to move to Rosarito and Jen relocated as well, the group is back to their competitive and productive ways via PokerStars.
We'll be watching for katie75013 at more final tables.
WCOOP and Macau Poker Cup
The World Championship of Online Poker provided plenty of tournament action in September. The three-week series was an exciting time of players from all backgrounds, countries, and bankrolls winning big. Satellites allowed many to play who couldn't afford the buy-ins, and the winner circles boasted of players from the top (Team PokerStars Pros George Danzer and Jason Mercier) to the new top (Main Event winner who qualified with FPPs). All of the results are on the WCOOP page.
One of the features of the 2012 WCOOP was a chronicling of Team Online's Adrienne "talonchick" Rowsome as she played the series via her PokerStars Mobile app. She started with an explanation and the first WCOOP events via these two videos. Then Adrienne showed how she dealt with various start times of the tournaments, some very early ones in her Canadian time zone that required leaving blankets and Gibson the cat in bed. She then took viewers into her analytical mind as she played an Omaha-8 tournament on her iPad, explaining some of her decisions as she went along. And she showed how important physical fitness is to staying alert and focused through the grind of three solid weeks of PokerStars tournaments.
Across an ocean from North America, Team PokerStars Pros Celina Lin and Vivian Im were competing in the 2012 Macau Cup Poker Championship. It was an exciting series, and the women took charge right away as Hazel Chui won Event 2. More was written about Chui's win here, and Vivian Im (pictured below) gave her thoughts on the series and the growth of women in poker.
September will begin with the World Series of Poker Europe playing out in Cannes, where Team Pro Ana Marquez already finished second in Event 6 and many others are chasing the Main Event title. The EPT San Remo is also on tap, so stay tuned for those results.
For all information pertaining to PokerStars Women, visit our website and links here .