Our Voices: Listening to and learning from our female poker playing community
By Nikki Allan
Today is International Women’s Day. A day to celebrate and shine a spotlight on the wonderful women around us. However, it’s much more than that to us, it’s about equality, inclusion and belonging. No matter who you are, what you look like, your age, race, gender, ability, or anything else.
Poker is a game where none of these matters. Poker is a game for everyone. Anyone can take a seat at the table. However, generally, poker is a male dominated game, but we know there is an active community of women across the globe who love the game, have opinions on what they’d like to see and experience, and how the game can be even more inclusive.
Over the years, we’ve carried out various activities to engage and celebrate our female players through special giveaways and unique content and most importantly, by listening and learning from our female community. And this year is no different.
Our Voices
Today, it seemed apt to launch a project we’ve been working on behind the scenes, ‘Our Voices’, our female insights community where we’ll be talking with our female poker community about all things poker.
We will be encouraging discussion, asking players for their thoughts on a range of topics to ensure we’re as inclusive, engaging and safe as possible. This feedback will not only influence our plans for women but will ensure a female perspective on all activity where research and insights are needed.
We are committed to getting feedback to see what we can do better, where we can improve, and ultimately enhance the growth of the game for players from all walks of life.
We have created this space so we could listen and learn more as we know this is key to ensuring we can bring activities and promotions that really engage and excite our female players and give you the best experience possible. We’ve been doing this by reaching out to female players on various forums and by getting direct individual feedback over the years, which worked well, but we wanted to create somewhere where all of your feedback can be in one place, where more women can get involved, and where we can talk and engage with you on a deeper level and share exciting updates.
We also want to talk to you about the big topics and understand your opinions and experiences, especially on areas where not just the game but the industry could be better. While we are a PokerStars team, we would love to go on a journey with our community that could be impactful well beyond our own tables. Join ‘Our Voices’ here.
Celebrating our community
Ahead of the launch of Our Voices, we were looking at what else we could do to celebrate women in the game and in our industry. So, we asked for self-filmed videos from players and women in the industry so we could create a celebratory video around this year’s International Women’s Day theme #ChooseToChallenge. What do you challenge us to do? What do you challenge yourself to do? Check it below. We received so many great videos and thoughts that we couldn’t quite fit into the video, so we’re looking at what else we can create with this content for the future.
Women’s Sunday
Finally, you may have seen yesterday we lowered the buy-in of the Women’s Sunday tournament to $22 and added three tickets worth $215 to the prestigious Sunday Million 15th Anniversary event on March 21, which has $12.5 million guaranteed.
We’re going to be testing the buy-in at this price for a few weeks, while raising awareness of it for those who would like to get involved, and showing players what they would need to do in order to do so (i.e. set your gender to female). We’re looking closely at these tournaments to make sure they’re as engaging as can be going forward as we know they are of interest to some of our female community.
We noticed there wasn’t a great deal of value to our Women’s Sunday tournaments and made a similar change last year when we celebrated International Women’s Day. We had lovely feedback from the community and the event was very successful so we want to take another look and see what we can do with this tournament on a more consistent basis. We’ve got more plans beyond women-only events, and there are many other areas to address, but we would love to work with you on that, and that is what Our Voices is all about.
The Women’s Sunday takes place at 14:40 ET every week on PokerStars.com.
And if you’ve been wondering who’s behind these female focused activities over the past few years, then you’ll be looking at a team of women. Rebecca, Amy, Moya and Monique, and myself, Nikki. We look forward to hearing from all of you!
Here’s to you today and everyday sister, we see you.
For more information on responsible gaming please visit our website at https://www.PokerStars.net/about/responsible-gaming/
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