Babes + Poker = Profit!

• Author: Qid
• Filed under: Erica Schoenberg, High Stakes News, Poker
• Date: Mar 26,2009

Being a pretty girl and playing poker can get you huge popularity lot easier than for men with same merits. Still, it can be hard for a female pro poker player to be taken seriously at the tables.

Vanessa Rousso, who finished second at the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship this year, is topping the list of the hot poker babes. Other female stars include Tiffany Michelle, Erica Schoenberg and Evelyn Ng, who are scheduled to do a photo shoot for Knockout Magazine.

So hot and so knowing the pot odds! Poker babes are for real!

Schoenberg, who is also known for being the fiancé of David Benyamine, thinks it makes a huge difference that a magazine like Knockout have chosen to use real female poker players for an issue rather than just using models in a poker theme.

Successful female players out in the media could help draw more female players to the game. Tiffany Michelle is confident that her success in the last years WSOP Main Event has given an extra boost to other women getting interested in poker:

“Dealers have told me that more young women would be playing poker today if I’d made the final table at the WSOP,” Michelle said. “I’ve had a lot of people tell me their wives or girlfriends got more interested in playing poker after seeing me in the WSOP.”

Rousso, who has best live tournament results of these four, said she sometimes feels like she’s singled out because she’s a woman. She still takes a lot of grief in online poker forums as a woman in poker:

“But in the end, being a woman is definitely to my advantage at the poker table,” Rousso said. “I can take advantage of the underestimation and stereotypes that will be attributed to me simply due to my gender.”

Schoenberg is hoping that more women start playing poker, which would bring more respect to all women players in the game:

“Because there aren’t as many women in the game as men, the really good players that are out there just don’t get noticed,” Schoenberg said. “Bringing more women in and making them a bigger part of the game will help with that and continue to bring more respectability to poker in general.”

Still, I don’t know if there would necessary be as many women as men in the top of poker world, if there were more women playing, but I agree the respectability part.

It is also funny how being good looking and poker player has more value than being a successful one. After all, really successful female players like Kathy Liebert and Annie Duke have been playing for ages and they rarely unfold in the media like their hotter and less successful colleagues Schoenberg and Michelle.

Source: pokerlistings