Jen

"This will be the last mention in this article of Jen Harman being a woman poker player.”

That was supposed to be the opening of this article, but without the quotes. That sentence has been the one constant on my computer screen in the seven weeks I’ve been pondering this assignment. The one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want Jennifer’s femininity to be a focal point in these pages, because it’s not the focal point of her being or what makes her exceptional.

Over those weeks, as the topic swirled in my mind, I thought I had a handle on it. I would present Jennifer as exceptional because, unlike any woman in the history of high-level competition, she’d achieved acceptance without reservation. That’s more or less my way of noting that her personality, skill, and competitive fire have allowed her to truly become one with the men she spends most of her time with; that these men just happen to be alpha dogs in one of the most misogynistic industries on the planet makes her place in their fraternity all the more remarkable.

As time passed, I got to speak with the men of her life: husband Marco Traniello; father-figure Doyle Brunson; best friend Daniel Negreanu; Chip Reese; Phil Ivey. Guys like Reese and Ivey tend to shy away from the spotlight. You ask them for an interview and they’ll look around for the closest exit, because they never sought the celebrity that poker has foisted upon them. They just want to play cards, and answering questions about such things tends to be foolish in an industry where information should be guarded like so much treasure. It’s a testament to Harman that the mention of her name gets these masterful mutes to sing like canaries. We’ll get back to them soon enough.

The point is that I couldn’t skirt around the whole “woman poker player” thing because it’s so fundamental to her uniqueness. Should she be being compared to other women players? No, because as Negreanu told me, “She’s Michael Jordan, they’re everyone else.” Still, she is what she is and to ignore that would present a flawed picture of the person.

On the final day of the Five Diamond North American Poker Championship, Jen drove out to the Bellagio to meet me for a fifteen-minute cup of coffee that turned into an hour-long cup of coffee. We’d spoken a few times in more casual tones at the World Series in July and Festa al Lago in October. We’d talked earlier in the month on the phone, giving me an opportunity to ask the questions to fill the holes in my research. Still, you don’t get a real feel for a subject until you sit face to face, topic in hand, watching every move. That’s when you really get to see the person you’re looking for.

Jen and I spoke, no recorder, no pen and paper – just a conversation between two people who love poker. When she talked about the game and the people she plays it with in Vegas, her face softened, nose crinkling with that soft-but-expressive smile. “I love poker,” she almost whispered at the end, and I knew it was from the heart. I also saw that she loved something else even more. To know what that was, you’ll need to read to the end.

Jen’s affair with poker started before she’d reached double digits. Living in Reno, her father hosted poker games and she was immediately taken by everything about them: the chips, the bonding, the drinks, the swearing, the money…it all painted a remarkably romantic picture. Poor kid never had a chance.

She started playing and watching Dad’s games constantly until he famously had her sit for him on a losing night five years later. There was a magic to the experience as she collected the winnings at the end of the night, and she was hooked. A friend of her father’s took her under his wing after recognizing her talent. Under the friend’s tutelage, she first made her way to the casino at sixteen, discovering Texas Hold’em, the game that she would call her specialty all these years later.

These games, at home and at the casino, were a natural environment for her. Jennifer had always been the girl who hung out with the guys. Her friends were mostly boys; they treated her as they would any of their number, except on the drunken, rowdy nights when they saw her as a little sister, protecting her and watching her back.

Her ascendancy in poker continued, and she started playing for a living. When she told her father, the man who’d introduced her to her passion in the first place, he was livid. He washed his hands of her as threatened, and they didn’t speak for over a decade. Despite this, the competitor in her wouldn’t allow her to give in.

“Jennifer is the most competitive person I’ve ever known.” Chip Reese told me. When I related the comment to her, Jennifer was taken aback for a moment, but it became obvious in the ensuing chat that he was right. Between shaky sips of her hot cider (her hands are constantly shaking while she drinks or eats) she told me that she regularly jumps around from high-stakes online games on FullTiltPoker.com on one computer, to spider solitaire on another, to video games on a third. When she met husband Marco, her most constant playmate in these and other games, he refused to believe the warnings about her competitive streak. “How could this adorable little blonde be the over-competitive maniac they all say she is?” Six months later, he told her their warnings had all been right.

I couldn’t help but wonder who she is competing with. She wants to win through her own skill, never using gamesmanship or intimidation when she plays. She feels no hatred for her opponents, like some do, going so far as to say she’s happy for them when they win. She’s playing in those $4,000-$8,000 games to make a living, but she’s also playing spider solitaire for no financial fulfillment. It’s the winning that keeps her going. “My sister is the same way,” she told me. It must be something she inherited from her mother.

While she lost her father to estrangement, she lost her mother to sickness. She was the one who passed along the gift of card sense to Jen, a gift that ultimately made her millions. Theirs was a relationship based on mutual adulation.

“When your mother passes away of kidney failure, and your kidney fails a year later, it makes you appreciate what you have,” Jen told me, her delicate hands passing bird-small portions of muffin to her mouth. In a world where most people take jobs they don’t enjoy because “that’s what you do,” it was this brush with mortality that allowed Harman the perspective needed to escape those restraints.

As a poker player, she was never given anything. She started at the low limits and worked her way upwards, specializing in Hold’em cash games but playing anything and everything. The rumors that she was started on a massive bankroll are just that — rumors. They had no foundation.

Working her way up the ranks, she eventually found her way into the biggest games in the world, where she’d continually clash with the best in the world. Those games are the toughest poker arenas in the world, and Harman got no slack. That she never asked for any, never asked to be treated any differently than anyone else, is a big part of her acceptance there.

No fewer than four of those players, word for word, called Jennifer “one of the boys.” They treat her like one, yelling and screaming at her as they would one another, cracking dirty jokes with her, commenting on the passing by of some nubile young waitress or starlet like they wouldn’t in the presence of any other woman.

If she’s going to be treated like one of the boys, she’s going to act like one. She doesn’t give an inch, coming back bigger and better when challenged by a tease or joke.

Jennifer’s strength as a player lies in the read. She understands the math, but she doesn’t hold by it nearly as much as gut. “You should hear her tell me a hand story,” Daniel Negreanu laughs. “It’s like ‘So, I’m in the cutoff and I bet…no wait… I was on the button and the cutoff bet to me but…hmm…no, actually…,’” Daniel jokes that there’s very little he can learn from talking over hands with her because she can’t explain her decisions as anything much more than hunches. Sometimes she just knows.

Harman’s career is difficult to document because so much of her success is unrecorded. She’s had her moments in the tournament sun, with two World Series of Poker bracelet wins in open events (she doesn’t play the women’s), and multiple appearances on World Poker Tour final table broadcasts. Thing is, she’d rather have been somewhere else.

“I hate tournaments,” she confides, explaining that there’s so much discipline involved for days on end. The fact that discipline can go unrewarded thanks to one bad river thirty hours in is frustrating. And after all that focus, all the time when she has no choice but to stay at the table, her takeaway might be $30,000-$40,000 (not a lot of money to a woman accustomed to playing in a $4,000- $8,000 game)…it’s all excruciating.

In cash games, there are really only two ways to judge a career: winnings and recognition from one’s peers. I didn’t ask about the winnings, but with the way she talks about that $30,000-$40,000, it’s obvious they’ve been in the many millions. Still, without documented proof, only the participants can really know who wins and who loses. It’s the recognition that indicates the level at which a player has been accepted.

Twice, Jennifer has been honored by her peers in being selected for intensive duties requiring incredible faith. The first was her selection by Doyle Brunson to author the Limit Hold’em section of Super System II, the updated version of his poker bible. She was chosen for the task, in Doyle’s words, because it’s his belief she’s the best Limit Hold’em player on the planet. It’s the highest kind of praise from the highest possible source.

The second such honor came by her being selected to play against Texas billionaire Andy Beal in the biggest heads-up Limit Hold’em cash game on record. Beal challenged the best in the world to a game where the bets reached as high as $100,000-$200,000 (Michael Craig documented the match in Bluff’s April issue), stakes high enough to require the usually big players to pool their resources for a bankroll. Needing a representative to play against Beal, it was Harman who was initially chosen earlier this year from a pool of players that includ-ed Doyle and Todd Brunson, Reese, Ted Forrest, Barry Greenstein, and several other stars of the game.

“It sucked to lose $5 million. I have to admit, though it wasn’t as bad as it would have been if it were all my money.” Still, you get the sense her remorse comes more from her desire to win than from the loss of the money itself. “Those things (Super System and the Beal game selection) really meant a lot to me. They showed a lot of faith from those guys.” It’s not that she begs for that respect, far from it. But it means the world to her.

In the end, I keep coming back to those three little words: “I love poker.” Jen lives it. She breathes it. Barely a day goes by when she doesn’t sit in Bobby’s Room in the Bellagio, a room which her own picture decorates, playing with the men she refers to as the greatest players in the world. Ivey respects the hell out of her. Doyle’s eyes light up and that famous grin of his always surfaces when you speak of her. Daniel can’t stop singing her praises.

Earlier, I told you I needed to write about Jennifer the woman poker player. I told you that was a central theme to her success. She doesn’t use feminine wiles. She doesn’t represent herself as being of “the weaker sex.” She comes to the table looking to win; looking to outplay the next guy. She plays any game for any amount, trades locker room jokes with the foulest mouths in the business, and earns their respect by not only standing up for herself, but by making others respect her where it counts — on the table.

“Not only is Jennifer the best woman player in the world… she’s one of the best players in the world.” We’ve all heard that a dozen times, but we shouldn’t ever have to hear it again. On its surface, it’s a compliment, but it reeks of patronization. We’re all grownups here. We’re all equals at the table. We all use our strengths and avoid our weaknesses in trying to win at this life-game we call poker. It’s idiotic then that this titan should be categorized. It belittles her to have to hear it. It belittles us to listen. The players who know don’t need to say it, because it’s irrelevant. I hope the media types reading this will make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Things are changing for Harman. After health problems that kept her out of the World Series in 2004, she’s flush and healthy now, both physically and emotionally. She’s recently stopped traveling to tournaments outside of Vegas, preferring to stay close to home in the light of new responsibilities. “Things are about to change for Jennifer,” Chip Reese told me. “She has babies now.” That’s babies, plural: two boys. Suddenly the woman whose gender should be irrelevant is thrust into a traditional female role: She’s a mom. Her face lights up every time you mention it — crinkled eyes and a beautiful, endless smile that screams love and adoration. That’s what I saw in that coffee shop that day. She shouldn’t be called a woman poker player, but she’s both. That she’s balanced the two so beautifully makes for all the more remarkable a person.

Thanks for the coffee, Jen, and congratulations. Gary Wise can be found having coffees with most of the world’s top pros. He writes about them and their greatest moments at www.wisehandpoker.com.