The Female Poker Advantage?
The last time I wrote on physical attributes in poker, I spoke on the fact that it’s easier to pull off a bluff if you’re and elderly woman. That it’s just biological, and there’s not much you can do about it if you’re a 20-something male.
Well, this time we’ll take a look at women and their psychology. Specifically, we’ll look at women and that little thing we like to call intuition.
Pokernews.com had a recent article on this, and I decided to follow up here for you on Everest poker.
It’s pretty well known on the professional circuit that decision making in poker is lightning fast and requires a very large awareness of other’s actions. People are always “making moves” so to speak, changing their table images, changing their play styles, changing their betting patterns.
So with all this trickery, it helps to have that little extra to help you though the tough spots. And for many women, they call it intuition.
Regardless of how one likes to define who intuition comes aboutwhether from the platonic idea of emotionalism, from the medical observance of the thicker corpus callosum of the brain, or from the societal construction that it has been developed over many generations of social conditioningit’s a sure thing that it exists and it works for women, especially in the poker world.
So how does it help? For one, it’s not about just going with that “gut feeling” such as playing 2-7 offsuit just because one has a feeling that it would hit.
Instead, the intution that is so valuable in the poker world, is that which helps to make the decisions after logic and math has failed. In those hands where one can’t decide whether to call or not, say trip kings up against a possible flush. It’s in these situations where intuition really shines.
It’s the fill in the gap insurance policy that so strongly manifests itself in women. After all, years of sociological research has shown that in general women “get” people better than men. It would only make sense, that on some unconscious level, they would be able to pick up on those subtle cues that lead them to intuitively make the right decision when confronted with a difficult choice. And as many players have felt, it’s one of those inexplicable forces that causes numerous headaches for the men on the circuit.
