“I was one of the original Mayfair Club big game players. It was a game in which you would sink or swim.”
Wendeen Eolis was the first woman to cash in the WSOP Main Event, in 1986, as well as the first woman to cash the event for a second time, in 1993. This week she’s back in Las Vegas, revisiting the biggest tournament in the world, but as she tells PokerOrg’s Craig Tapscott, her poker roots run much deeper than that.
Until its closure in 2000, the Mayfair Club in New York City was one of the east coast’s most prestigious cardrooms, noted for its high stakes and tough players. Eolis was one of them.
“Howard Lederer was in the game,” recalls Eolis of those mid-80s days which produced so many elite players, “Jay Heimowitz, Danny Harrington, Jason Lester, Billy Horan. Erik Seidel came in a little bit later. I was, like, the 9th best player at the table.”
As an education, it was a tough crowd to run with, but it would prepare Eolis for what lay ahead: a distinguished career in poker, law and government.
It wasn’t long until she found herself in Las Vegas for her first World Series of Poker. The odds — at least according to the bookies — were against her.
“There was a guy who was an oddsmaker who kiddingly said — or maybe not so kiddingly — that I would probably come in last. He took a bet from an old time player who had known me from my blackjack days, who came to him and said ‘I’d like to take a little bet on the lady from New York.’
"Once he did that, I walked over to him and said, ‘Could I have a little piece of myself, because I think I could cash?’ He said, ‘You know, no one's ever done that as a woman here’. I said, ‘I'll take a piece anyway.’”
'They wanted to beat me fair and square'
The performance of Shiina Okamoto at this year’s WSOP, pulling off almost unbelievable back-to-back wins in the $1,000 Ladies Championship after finishing as runner-up in 2023, has positioned the player from Japan as a significant figure in modern poker.
With such widely lauded accomplishments, it’s difficult to imagine a time when women’s achievements in poker were not just uncelebrated, but almost unheard of. Eolis went on to make the money in the 1986 WSOP as the first woman ever to do so, though payout structures back then were barely recognizable compared with those of today: for her 25th place finish, she earned… $10,000. The final table bubble — Dewey Tomko — received only $12,500.
Eolis’ next major poker achievement was a win at the 1990 European Poker Championships in the Isle of Man.
“No one expected it,” says Eolis, “I certainly didn’t. It was a big buy-in but a very small field, and I took it seriously and I wanted to play the best that I could play. I won it accidentally because nobody was paying any attention to my accumulation of chips, I guess they thought that they’d snatch them at the end.”
Then, three years later, Eolis was back in the WSOP Main Event for her second cash — the first time a female player had made the money twice. This time she finished slightly higher in ths standings — 20th place — but actually came out in profit with $12,000 in prize money.
She almost didn’t make it, having come down with a respiratory illness as the tournament got underway. With all the smoking that was present at the tables back then, she found it hard to breathe and was worried she wouldn’t even be able to play.
That is, until a World Champion came to her aid. Johnny Chan, back-to-back Main Event winner in 1987-88, made sure the players at the table stubbed out the cigarettes so Eolis could play in comfort. As he put it, ‘We want to beat her fair and square!’
“I played with Johnny [Chan] and Doyle [Brunson] and all of those people for years and years,” says Eolis, “I go back with all those fellows a long time and I have very high respect for people who decided to make poker their profession. But I’m really a business person. I’ve had a 9-to-5 schedule for a long time now, and I mean AM to PM, not PM to AM!”
'It's remarkable to me how much poker teaches you'
Indeed, impressive as Eolis’ achievements in poker are — including a position on Caesars’ player advisory council, a long period as a poker writer and even a short stint as Chair of the World Poker Association — it’s in the fields of business, law and government that she has made her biggest marks.
She is a lecturer, a public speaker and at the age of 80 still runs her own business, a legal consulting company.
“l've seen a recession or two, it gives you a little humility,” says Eolis. “It's remarkable to me how much poker teaches you, if you are alert and if you understand that negotiating is what we do from cradle to grave."
“The difference between negotiations in poker and negotiations in business is very clear to me. In business you win, and I win, and we come back and play another day. In poker your view has to be ‘I win, you lose, and I kill you’, and that's not really how I want to live my life.
“I love to be competitive, I love to do something that wasn't done before, but I've never aspired to win the World Series of Poker… Until today.”
Eolis bagged up at the end of Day 1C, but was one of the players to be eliminated during Sunday's Day 2.
