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added on 2011-07-07 01:53:54
The “Ladies No-Limit Hold-Em Championship” was once again a controversy event at the 2011 WSOP in Las Vegas.
As its name suggests, the event was created especially for women, to celebrate their presence in the world of poker. The 2011 Ladies event was turned this year into a poker festival that started with a parade of World Series of Poker female champions. 16 former champions, such as Vanessa Selbst, Jennifer Harman, Linda Johnson, Barbara Enright, or Deby Callihan, were honored during the parade.
Despite being the subject of a lot of negative attention from poker fans, fifteen men decided to enter the 1055 player field at the 2011 Ladies No-Limit Hold-em Championship. One of them, Jonathan Epstein managed to get to the final table of the $1k Ladies event, finishing in 9th place, for a payday of $13,701. Many poker fans saw his success as disrespectful to the women's poker game.
“I figured it wasn’t going to be a big deal but I was clearly wrong,” he said. “Obviously there are a lot of people who are upset,” the man said after the event.
However, the luckiest female player was Marsha Wolak, who ended up victorious at the final table winning her first bracelet and the $192,244 first place prize. The woman proved to be a tough competitor for the veteran Karina Jett, who finished in second position. Wolak, who is a professional poker player from Sarasota, Fla., took a class at the WSOP Academy and she thinks it was that class that helped her win the championship.
"It was so much fun," she said after her win. "It's a dream come true. You start out thinking it would be so much fun and you dream about this. It's really nice to say at the end of each day, 'I'm still here.' That was my goal was to make it to the end of each day."
The final table results at the 2011 WSOP ladies event were:
Marsha Wolak - $192,344;
Karina Jett - $119,010;
Carol Tomlinson - $74,459;
Valerie Mccolligan - $54,054;
Peg Ledman - $39,897;
Katherine Stahl - $29,909;
Jennifer Cowan - $22,750;
Gloutnez Genevine - $17,537;
Jonathan Epstein - $13,701;
Amanda Sizemore - $10,483.
The first WSOP ladies event was held in 1977 and it has grown in participation ever since.
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