GGPoker has confirmed that its 2022 WSOP Online Ladies Championship, scheduled for September 10, 2022, will indeed be a ladies-only event with gender verification confirmed via official ID in order to participate. The ladies-only clarification follows an intended controversy in April when GGPoker when its FLIP Ladies Championship, a ladies-themed event in April offered as part of poker's International Women's Day (IWD) celebration, ended up being open to all players, regardless of gender.
It turned out that at the time GGPoker did not have a system in place to track or verify the gender of its players, but that has been addressed in recent months. Fixing the gap was necessary to protect the continuity of the WSOP-themed event as a ladies-only offering, since the September 10 tourney is the online counterpart, open in this instance to non-U.S. players, of the WSOP's live Ladies Championship in Las Vegas.
According to a statement from GGPoker, a framework is already in place to "ensure that the event lives up to its name." The framework includes these points:
- Players' real names will be displayed in the lobby post-registration;
- GGPoker will manually vet registered players before the start of both Day 1 and Day 2, and unregister/disqualify players that are not female (we will review identify verification records);
- Male players that are unregistered/disqualified will not receive their buy-in back; the buy-in remains part of the prize pool.
"GGPoker is delighted to run a WSOP Online Ladies Event, and we will work tirelessly to ensure the integrity of this tournament," said Paul Burke, GGPoker's Head of Public Relations. "Engaging with different communities of poker players has always been important to us and we hope to continue to move in the right direction on this into the future!"
GGPoker may not yet have the capability to automatically check a given player's gender during event registration. Instead, the manual vetting by GG staff will occur on both days of the Ladies tourney. Expect plenty of warnings aimed at would-be male entrants who seek to register, so that disqualification and forfeiture of entry fees will be imposed as seldom as possible.
The possibility that male players could find a way to enter what is designed as a ladies-only event caused at least a few women to contact GGPoker directly in the wake of April's FLIP Championship snafu. Since the schedule for the series was announced last week, GGPoker has been responding to such inquiries with confirmation that the September 10 tournament will indeed be ladies-only. Confirmations such as this have since made their way onto social media:
Featured image source: GGPoker
