It’s
All About the Money and a Little Piece of Poker History
By:
Derrick Oliver
I was so excited! It was the exact reason I embarked on this
journey of mine, a fascination called High Roller Radio – a chance to meet,
talk to and get inside the head of gambling greats and poker legends. I was about to enter into a 20 minute Q&A
session with a member of poker royalty.
Barbara Enright is the only woman to ever reach the final table of the
Main Event at the World Series of Poker.
She was the first woman ever to win an open event at the WSOP and she is
a member of poker’s Hall of Fame. She
also has three WSOP gold bracelets in her jewelry collection.
As the phone rang I knew what my first
question was going to be, considering the Main Event for 2012 had just wrapped
up and the last two women standing finished 11th and 10th. They were a victim of the so-called final
table “bubble”, a final table that only accepts nine. They were right there, at the doorway, oh so close
to a piece of gaming history, to a place beside Enright and to having a chance
at $8.5 million.
“Hello,” she answered, “Hi Barbara,” I
said, and we were off to the races. A
true High Roller was about to grace the airwaves on High Roller Radio.
“The honest answer is this,” she said,
sounding as though she’d been approached with this inquiry before. “Records are meant to be broken and nobody
can ever take away the fact that I was the first. The distinction is nice but I don’t think
about it much. I play poker for
money. I know it would have been special
for them and I was pulling for them. I
was happy for them and I was hoping both would have made the final table and
one of them would have won. People think
it bothers me but it doesn’t. They made
a good run and made some good money.”
Enright can empathize with being
close. In 1985, the same year she became
the first woman to win an open event, with men and women, Enright navigated a
large and talented field of runners to make it to the showcase finale. She finished 5th for a good payday
but a ton of heartbreak as well.
“It was a really terrible feeling for me,
more so because of the beat I took,” Enright reflected, referring to way she was
eliminated that year, her pocket 8’s losing to an opponent’s 6 3 of
diamonds. “If I had pocket 10’s up
against pocket Aces I could understand it.
That was tough. It still haunts
me today.”
So Enright, in her way, can fully
understand what the bubble women of 2012 are going through now and will have to
relive later. She acknowledges the
upper-level female players in the game today are holding their own. Players like Vanessa Selbst, Vanessa Rousso,
Annette Oberstad, Annie Duke and Jennifer Harman are celebrated to the point
their gender never enters the conversation.
They’re just ‘poker players’.
“I think the ones who play seriously are
as good as any man, if not better. It
kind of proves it, with the two women finishing 10th and 11th
this year. Considering how many women
are playing, percentage-wise, they’re doing better than the men.”
Barbara Enright has three children but
says she was never discouraged from pursuing a life on the green felt. In the early days she held jobs as a waitress
and bartender but eventually settled on pokers.
She was simply making too much playing cards. She put in the time and effort to make it in this,
as cutthroat an industry as there is.
“Women have an equal footing in poker
although I don’t think it’s a perfect sport because you’re sitting a lot and
sitting isn’t all that good for you. I
like the poker but I could have chosen a career that was better for me
physically.”
Elected to poker’s Hall of Famer in 2007
alongside Phil Hellmuth, Enright was enshrined into poker immortality as one of
the game’s all-time best, was reserved a chair beside the likes of Johnny Moss,
Amarillo Slim, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson and Stu Ungar, who she had dinner
with once but “didn’t really know him”, she said referring to the troubled
genius, the card savant who died as the result of drugs and reckless
living. She is still the only woman ever
to make the final table at the Main Event, a distinction she likes but one, for
Enright, that pales in comparison to the cash.
She owns three bracelets and she is a legend.
When the interview was over and we said
our good-bye’s I thought to myself, ‘that was awesome, I just spoke to a High
Roller. To listen to the full interview
visit www.highrollerradioshow.com .
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