How Women’s High Rollers Are Changing the Game; Jen Shahade on Building a Ladder to the Top

The PokerStars Girls’s Summer season Pageant is underway, with the Major Occasion underway after the £1,100 Girls’s Excessive Curler topped its champion. Girls’s Excessive Curler tournaments are a comparatively new addition to the poker panorama, with PokerStars operating its first eventually 12 months’s Girls’s Winter Pageant.

In the meantime, the Wynn Summer season Sequence $3,000 Women Excessive Curler this summer time attracted 76 entries and confirmed simply how widespread the idea will be.

PokerStars Main the Method for Girls in Poker

Amongst these championing it’s long-time PokerStars Ambassador and chess champion Jen Shahade.

Having joined PokerStars in 2014 as a thoughts sports activities ambassador, Shahade has been on the forefront of initiatives to make poker extra inclusive, notably for girls. Over the course of her profession, she’s seen the sport evolve, each by way of how girls are welcomed and the way they’ll entry the instruments to compete on the highest ranges.

“PokerStars has all the time been forward of the curve in terms of bringing girls into the sport”

“PokerStars has all the time been forward of the curve in terms of bringing girls into the sport and understanding what girls might want from a poker pageant and poker generally,” mentioned Shahade.

“This newest push is very attention-grabbing as a result of, I believe what Kerryjane Craigie and the group have grasped is that there are extra critical feminine gamers than ever earlier than.”

Shahade attributes a lot of this progress to what she calls “the democratisation of examine instruments”, with quite a few high-quality coaching assets accessible to anybody motivated sufficient to make use of them.

“[In the past] it was laborious to know what to review, not to mention to have the ability to have these instruments at your fingertips. However now I believe it is an ideal time for there to be extra prestigious girls’s occasions.

“Girls who’re hungry to show themselves. They could have the information, however may not have the bankroll to play the excessive rollers on the common circuit, however need to play in these girls’s excessive curler tournaments.”

Girls’s Excessive Rollers: A New Ladder to the Prime

Shahade performed in each the inaugural Girls’s Winter Pageant Excessive Curler again in November 2024 and the Girls’s Excessive Curler earlier this week, ending ninth. She says that in current months, operators have acknowledged the significance of giving girls an opportunity in Excessive Curler conditions.

“The very first [Women’s High Roller] was such an incredible facet of the pageant final 12 months. And there are such a lot of girls changing into extra enthusiastic concerning the sport, and so they need a possibility to compete with different nice feminine gamers. It lets girls compete in a tricky however small discipline, with everybody extremely motivated to win and take house the trophy.”

Constructing Abilities, Confidence, and Illustration

Past the competitors, Shahade sees these excessive rollers as a transparent ladder for girls in poker, bridging the hole from native video games to main open fields. For some, the Girls’s Excessive Curler is their first style of a four-figure buy-in, a confidence-building step towards taking part in in bigger open excessive rollers and most important occasions.

“I undoubtedly see it as a pathway, 100%,” says Shahade. “I believe if we proceed to see extra occasions like these, it creates an impact the place gamers who’re rising have one thing to shoot for that’s very reachable. It will get girls extra snug in closing desk conditions, the place a lot of the cash is. Even proving that you just’re somebody who is probably value staking since you’ve proved in these smaller fields.

“The subsequent step is seeing extra girls on the high throughout all ranges.”

Based mostly in the UK, Will began working for PokerNews as a contract dwell reporter in 2015 and joined the full-time employees in 2019. He now works as Managing Editor.

He graduated from the College of Kent in 2017 with a B.A. in German. He additionally holds an NCTJ Diploma in Sports activities Journalism.