The Boeree Principle

Amid the poker-related news of the past week, you might have heard something about a short video by the Institute of Physics featuring poker pro Liv Boeree that appeared last week. I wanted to mention (and share) it here, as it includes what I find to be several worthwhile messages.

The Institute of Physics is a U.K.-based organization that functions as a charity, a lobbying group, and a professional association for educators and scholars. First formed way back in 1874, the IOP currently boasts about 40,000 members from all over the world. The IOP’s mission involves promoting and advancing physics education and research, working with policy makers to help increase understanding of physics, as well as publishing and producing materials related to physics education.

The video featuring Boeree is an example of the latter, made to promote physics education and in particular to encourage girls to consider physics as a possible area of study. Before winning the 2010 EPT San Remo Main Event in April 2010 and becoming a Team PokerStars Pro a few months later, Boeree studied physics and astrophysics at the University of Manchester where she earned a 1st Class Honours Degree.

In the video Boeree persuasively explains how her background in physics has proven useful to her at the poker tables, among other topics. Take a look:

I particularly like what Boeree says when she insists that being a professional poker player hardly means she is “wasting” her physics degree.

“The beauty of doing physics as a degree is that it doesn’t mean you have to become a physicist... you don’t have to become a research scientist” explains Boeree. “The training that I got from physics -- the way it’s trained my mind to think -- has enabled me to go into such an analytical game as poker.”

I often find myself making an analagous point when talking to undergraduates who are uncertain about the usefulness of, say, a degree in English or some other major for which future job prospects aren’t necessarily obvious.

Many students are under the false impression that getting a degree in English necessarily means one is destined to become a teacher (and probably destined to earn a less-than-desirable salary, too). In fact, there are a lot of students who are under the false impression that any non-business degree is somehow going to be a waste of time for them, which to me largely misses the entire point of going to college -- i.e., to learn how to think and thus prepare yourself for later life, with the obtaining of a credential mostly incidental to that training.

Boeree goes on to talk about how playing poker and studying physics both involve making complex decisions with many variables and bits of information that you have to sort through when analyzing a problem. Her argument is similar to that posed by Jennifer Ouelette in an article titled “Big Game Theory” that appeared in Discover magazine a couple of years ago.

Ouelette draws many of the same connections Boeree does, in fact, when she talks about the way “poker appeals to physicists because it is an intricate, complex puzzle... steeped in statistical probabilities and the tenets of game theory.” Ouelette also brings up how poker and physics both present problems in “partial information” that players/researchers are challenged to solve. I wrote more about Ouelette’s article -- and about connections between physics and poker -- in a post titled “Physicists & Poker.”

Like I say, I appreciate the messages Boeree is helping the IOP deliver with this video, among which we might list defenses of both higher education and poker. The encouragement to young women not to shy away from male-dominated fields like physics or poker (or heavy metal!) is commendable, too.

But most of all I like the larger argument that whatever you happen to study -- I mean really study with earnestness and a genuine desire to learn -- that work of interpretation and analysis and “training your mind” will necessarily prove of use to you when encountering subsequent problems and challenges.

Call it a principle of education, sometimes unheeded, but ultimately inviolable.

Hooray for Boeree; Remembering Richmond

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Liv Boeree took down that European Poker Tour San Remo event yesterday, coming out on top of a huge field of 1,240 players to claim the €1,250,000 first prize. Lot of folks excited about it. Boeree becomes the third woman to win an EPT Main Event, following Vicky Coren (EPT London 2006) and Sandra Naujoks (EPT Dortmund 2009).

Boeree’s win also comes on the heels of Vanessa Selbst’s NAPT Mohegan Sun victory less than two weeks ago. And a month before that, Annie Duke took down the NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship -- not an “open” event, but still one in which men had only prevailed in the past.

Some object to assigning too much importance to women winning events such as these, arguing that doing so reinforces the significance of a player’s sex and thus suggests another kind of inequality in the way one views women players as opposed to men.

There’s something to that argument, I suppose. But still, it is hard not to recognize the uniqueness of women succeeding in these big buy-in, “big bet” tourneys, especially given the small number of women entering them as compared to men.

By the way, even before Selbst’s win at the NAPT Mohegan Sun, Jen Newell and I chose the topic of women & no-limit hold’em tourneys for our April “He Said/She Said” columns over at Woman Poker Player. There we were separately responding to a chapter in James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he offers a few thoughts about why men seem “biologically inclined to sign up for” NLHE tourneys.

As we were working on our articles, Selbst won her NAPT title, and so we both ended up making reference to her win. You can see what else we said about McManus’s ideers here: He Said / She Said.

Last week I also wrote a post here called “Women and the WSOP.” There I mentioned how even though 12 different women had won open WSOP events, none had done so in a NLHE event (aside from Annette Obrestad’s 2007 WSOPE Main Event title). In that post I included a list of women who had won WSOP bracelets in open events, with Vera Richmond being the first to do so back in 1982 in the $1,000 buy-in Ace-to-Five Draw event.

Curiously, when people discuss this topic many tend to overlook Richmond’s victory and cite Barbara Enright’s 1996 bracelet in the $2,500 pot-limit hold’em event as the first by a woman in an open-field WSOP tourney. In fact, when it comes to poker history, Richmond is probably better known not for her WSOP bracelet but for her involvement in that story in which Amarillo Slim Preston allegedly said he’d cut his own throat if a woman ever won the WSOP Main Event -- another story the accuracy of which sometimes gets skewed.

According to the story, at the 1973 WSOP Main Event, Richmond -- who according to this had to have been the first woman ever to play in the Main Event -- enjoyed the chip lead for a time, and during a break took the opportunity to tell Preston she intended to win the sucker. Preston (the reigning champ) responded by telling Richmond that if she were to win the tourney, she could cut his throat with a “dull knife.”

The exchange later got retold in such a way as to suggest Preston had threatened to cut his own throat, and that his threat referred to any woman winning the event (not just Richmond). Preston himself later would exploit the apocryphal version of the story, such as in 2000 when both Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert made deep runs in the Main Event, as recounted by McManus in Positively Fifth Street.

(EDIT [added 1:00 p.m.]: Actually there are other problems with this story, including the fact that Richmond didn't play in the 1973 event at all. Hat tip to Kevmath here, who points us to an article by Susie Isaacs that suggests Barbara Freer was the first woman to play in the WSOP ME in 1978.)

That was about all I recalled about Vera Richmond, too, other than the fact that she always gets described as a “brusque cosmetics heiress” in histories and on the web. There was, however, a reference to Richmond not too long ago on the Gamblers Book Shop podcast (episode 63, 3/19/2010).

There guest Linda Johnson -- the third woman to win a WSOP in an open event (1997, $1,500 Razz) -- noted how Richmond “never got credit for her win,” referring to what I mentioned earlier about how Enright tends to be more readily cited as the first woman to win an open WSOP event.

Host Howard Schwartz asked Johnson why that was the case. “Well, she wasn’t very popular,” answered Johnson. “She was kind of mean and nasty... spoke like a truck driver, and nobody liked her. And so when she won her event, she never got credit for it, which isn’t right because plenty of asshole men have won and they are in the record books.”

Kind of interesting -- and not that surprising -- how the story of the first woman to win a WSOP open event appears to involve ideas of traditional “gender roles” as well as (in the Amarillo Slim story) men showing some resistance to the idea of women playing and succeeding.

Times have changed, certainly. The general enthusiasm about Boeree’s win yesterday -- from both men and women -- is evidence of that.