These women are the driving force behind the casino industry

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These Women are the Driving Force Behind the Casino Industry

Professional Poker Players and CEOs: Women in the Casino World

Gambling is often thought of as a male industry. Yet women have excelled in professional poker and served as CEOs of top gaming companies, as these stories show.

Games of chance are a popular form of entertainment across the globe, as both men and women enjoy classic games like roulette or blackjack. Yet professional gambling is often regarded as an industry that mostly appeals to men. While it seems that most professional players in games like poker are men, gambling is by no means an activity that is reserved to male players or entrepreneurs, as these female trailblazers demonstrate.

Vanessa Selbst: The Best Female Pro Poker Player of All Time

Casino and gambling are often depicted in pop culture as a male-dominated world. Yet even if the occasional poker table on Friday night was mostly a thing where only guys were invited; the online casino industry has contributed to changing that. The advent of online casinos has allowed everyone to play from the convenience of their home and has allowed female gambling enthusiasts to gain significant experience even at highly competitive games like high stakes roulette or obscure poker variants. There are many online casinos like the top names you can find here that offer a wide variety of games and different variants of each. For instance, for roulette, there’s French Roulette, American Roulette, and European Roulette, while land-based casinos tend to only offer one of these in most cases. These platforms even have mobile apps and/or websites so that gamblers can play on the go.

Photo credit: @VanessaSelbst Twitter

This democratization that was brought about by the online casino industry has helped close the gender gap slightly and also provided career opportunities for women to get in the business – and in some cases, excel. Vanessa Selbst is widely considered the most successful female professional poker player in history. The 34-year-old recently quit the game to become an investment analyst, employing her wit, strategic thinking and risk-taking boldness to another type of “gambling”, as she jokingly states. However, for gambling aficionados, she will always be remembered best for becoming the first female player to win three World Series of Poker bracelets in open field gaming events – the highest non-monetary accolade any professional poker player aspires to win.

Virginia McDowell: CEO of Top Casino Corporation

She also became the female player to get the highest earnings in 2013 in poker history and has amassed a total of $11,843,700 in winnings during her professional years. But Selbst is by no means alone in the game. Kathy Liebert is renowned for making the WSOP final tables since 1997, while Annie Duke, sister of pro poker player Howard Lederer, has also placed high in WSOP events, even claiming a win in the No Limit Hold ‘Em Tournament of Champions in 2004. While some female players, like Selbst or Duke, have retired, other like Norwegian Annette Obrestad or Taiwan-born JJ Liu are still carrying the flag high.

Women don’t shine only as professional players, but as entrepreneurs too. Women like Virginia McDowell, who has 35 years of experience under her belt, are the driving force behind the casino industry. McDowell was the first woman to serve president and CEO of a prestigious gaming provider, after having launched her career in casino haven Atlantic City. Having applied her unique insight to her job, examining consumer trends and developing corporate strategy, she has frequently served as an expert and keynote speaker in major industry events. Lately, she became the president of non-profit organization Global gaming Women, aiming to support and mentor other women in the sector.

Even though they are arguably underrepresented in popular conceptions of what the casino industry is about, many women have left their mark in the field – and they are slowly changing how things are done in the gambling world.

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