LIPS hot for Ladies Poker Championship

Dan Taylor
April 22, 2010
6 Comments
Orpe, orpe and away

Orpe, orpe and away

Earlier this week, the Ladies International Poker Series (LIPS) announced that it is going to hold the first ever US Ladies Poker Championship. The two-day event, which will take place on September 4th and 5th and will be held at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

The US Ladies Poker Championship will have a buy-in of $500+$50 and be broadcast on the internet by Poker Netcast, the same people who brought the US market, Live At The Bike. In fact discussions are ongoing to broadcast future LIPS events on television.

Let’s face it, this is a fine idea. After all we all like girl-on-girl action and the sisters seem to be doing it for themselves these days. Only yesterday the lovely Liv Boeree proved that’s she’s just as much poker face as she is a pretty face by taking down the EPT San Remo – and she is not alone in finding success at the felts. Vanessa Helbst, Annie Duke and Vanessa Rousso have all been big winners this year.

While the cynics believe that these tournaments are a backwards step for women, who are already proving they can rub shoulders, and other parts, with the men at the highest level, anything that encourages the fairer sex to get involved with tournament poker is fine by me. Some girls feel intimidated by the stigma of gambling and casinos or are just plain turned off by sitting next to pissed blokes for hours on end, so the likes of Liv Boeree can only attract more of her kind to the tables. And bring’em on I say. Or off…

I’ll never forget seeing Ms Boeree and Michelle Orpe competing on the GUKPT a couple of years back and they were both up for a laugh and great value for money – not that they’d take mine. Mixing it with the big boys and bringing some unexpected glamour to the the grim Kentish backwater that is Thanet they were a breath of fresh air to poker.

The only problem the US Ladies Poker Championship has got is that you aren’t going to attract much in the way of online satellite qualifers for the event. Nevada’s bricks and mortar casinos have got involved because they’re allowed to, but no online operator is going to run the risk of getting involved before a judgment is reached on the legalization and regulation of online poker in the US – unless it is already operating there. No surprise then that PokerStars and Victory Poker are the only website offering satellite qualifiers for the event.

But while there may be restrictions for online qualifiers in the US, there are no such limitations for many of Europe’s operators. In fact the Old World just needs to devise ways of luring women to the tables. We already have already the European Ladies Poker Championship, which Boeree won in 2008, and PokerStars has also launched the Luxury Ladies Poker Club, which offers the incentive of winning through to the tables of the €1,100 Ladies Championship, staged at one of Monte Carlo’s finest hotels, the Columbus Monaco.

But surely we can go further. Surely this is a golden egg waiting to be laid. There must be a UK TV company out there that can see the value in this? All you do is, put up a massive prize pool, pay for Pamela Anderson, Shannon Elizabeth, and the Ayre Heads to take part, introduce a fancy dress theme – like Grange Hill. Or better still Baywatch – and watch the ratings go through the roof.

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Tags: Article, Ladies International Poker Series, Liv Boeree, Poker Stars
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