Vanessa Selbst Getting Her Due: He Said/She Said | Woman Poker Player Magazine

He Said/She Said: He Said:Selbst Getting Her Due

Written by Martin Harris

Thursday, 25 November 2010 12:03

Vanessa Selbst is having one hell of a 2010. Have you been paying attention?

With nearly $1 million in career tourney earnings and a WSOP bracelet (in 2008), Selbst was already a well established, highly regarded pro even before the year began. But this year has been absolutely through the roof for the 26-year-old law school student.

After a couple of deep runs in preliminary events at the Aussie Millions in January, Selbst bested a field of 716 to win the NAPT Mohegan Sun in April for a $750,000 score. Then, after cashing in the WSOP Main Event in July, making the semis of the EPT Talinn heads-up NLHE event in August, and finishing fourth in the EPT London High Roller event (for $226,910), Selbst landed yet another major title earlier this month with her victory in the Partouche Poker Tour Grand Final in Cannes.

At Partouche, Selbst came out on top of a field of 764 to earn a cool €1.3 million (worth more than $1.8 million), thereby bringing her 2010 total earnings to a jawdropping $2.86 million. She is now not only close to the top of the 2010 money list -- in fact, the only names ahead of her are the top five finishers at the WSOP Main Event! -- her career total of $3.7 million-plus has her close to catching Annie Duke for the most tourney winnings ever earned by a woman.

Should the poker world be taking more notice? In particular, should more have been made of Selbst’s victory at Partouche and its significance with regard to Selbst’s constantly-improving poker resume, 2010 “player of the year” races, and all-time winningest women lists?

At least a couple of factors caused Selbst’s win to go largely unnoticed. One was the timing of the PPT. While the Grand Finale began back in September, the PPT decided to mimic the WSOP Main Event and delay its final table, in fact choosing to have the players reconvene on the very same weekend as did the “November Nine.”

As a result, while Selbst was cruising to victory in Cannes, the attention of most poker fans and media was mostly occupied by the events taking place at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, with news of the PPT’s outcome necessarily moving “below the fold” (as it were) for most poker news outlets.

Another factor affecting coverage of Selbst’s win was the cheating scandal at Partouche involving Ali Tekintamgac, a German player who made the final nine, but on the eve of the tourney’s restart was disqualified for having committed “fraudulent actions” earlier in the event. In many cases, Tekintamgac’s cheating and disqualification became the primary story to come out of Cannes that weekend, with Selbst’s victory being something of a footnote to news about this event.

In other words, there were multiple reasons why Selbst’s victory earlier this month might not have received the attention it was due. Like often is the case in poker, it was mostly a matter of timing.

Still, some have wondered whether or not Selbst being a woman might have also had something to do with the way her PPT victory was covered. In other words, if, say, a high-profile male player had taken down the event at Cannes, might the story of his win been more apt to fight through these other stories to grab more of the poker world’s attention?

My short answer to that bit of speculation is to say no. I don’t think the fact that Selbst is a woman had much at all to do with her win at Partouche not getting as much attention as it might have deserved.

I’ll make my answer longer, however, and add that I do believe women poker players routinely get covered differently than do the men, and that in many instances the difference involves a bias that often results in women receiving less credit for their successes than they deserve, and sometimes even earning more censure for their missteps than is warranted.

Just to seize upon a recent example, I am thinking of how women were covered -- as well as how some responded to that coverage in forums and elsewhere -- during ESPN’s recently-concluded presentation of the WSOP Main Event.

It was not a particularly great year for women in the WSOP ME this year. Big names like Duke, Jennifer Harman, Kathy Liebert, and others were all there as usual, though all fell short of the cash. Indeed, no woman would finish higher than amateur player Breeze Zuckerman, who went out in 121st.

One woman given a lot of attention by ESPN was the 21-year-old phenom Annette Obrestad. Obrestad was a Day 1 casualty, and ESPN shared a number of hands from her struggle-filled day.

On one hand early on, Obrestad is shown making an especially difficult river fold, suspecting her full house (fours full of jacks) could not be best. “I’m gonna look like a donkey if I’m wrong,” says Obrestad with a smile afterwards. In fact, she looked like anything but, having correctly read her opponent as having had a better hand.

Still, when it came to her ESPN-WSOP debut, many focused more so on a couple of other hands involving Obrestad. In one, Obrestad makes it to the end against the veteran pro Chris Bjorin with ace-high while he manages to river trip eights. After Bjorin checks, Obrestad cannot bring herself to bluff the river, then expresses disappointment when she sees his hand, thinking out loud about how the community cards had proven especially fortunate to Bjorin.

“She’s losing the hand and she’s dismissive of her opponent,” opines Norman Chad in his commentary, describing her behavior as “Hellmuth-like.”

Later, Obrestad’s is shown being eliminated, once again in a hand against Bjorin. On a 9-2-2 flop, she commits her stack with A-J and Bjorin calls her with pocket queens. “Nice call,” she says wearily upon seeing his cards. “She doesn’t mean that,” clarifies Chad. “So sick,” she says to no one in particular, kind of thinking aloud to herself. “I thought I could get him to fold that.”

Relatively speaking, it was a very minor bit of complaining by Obrestad. Yet Chad likened her to the all-time champion complainer, and posters in the forums followed his lead in their criticisms of her apparent petulance. Of course, if anyone took a more than a moment to compare the young Norwegian’s behavior to that often demonstrated by the Poker Brat, her response to things not going well for her was especially tame, hardly deserving of such a comparison.

Selbst -- who made it much deeper in the Main Event, even challenging for the chip lead on Days 2 and 3 -- was given some airtime as well by ESPN, though not as much as Obrestad. Of course, given her incredible run this year, it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see Selbst featured in episodes at the 2011. In fact, I’d more surprised if she weren’t.

Indeed, I’d suggest that women who succeed in poker on the level Selbst currently is are probably [i]more[/i] likely to receive coverage than are men, if only because there are fewer women succeeding at such a high level. In other words, as far as the Partouche Poker Tour Grand Finale is concerned, one could argue that the winner being a woman may well have garnered the event a bit more attention than it might have otherwise captured, although the competing stories of the WSOP ME and the cheating scandal certainly got in the way.

That said, “more” coverage of women poker players isn’t necessarily going to mean “better” coverage -- especially if long-standing biases toward female players are allowed to influence the way that coverage is handled.