Poker News

Wendeen Eolis

Wendeen Eolis was up early on a recent morning for business-related conference calls to Asia and Europe, all about deals requiring her expertise concerning the strategic use of lawyers to get big deals done.

She was working from her hotel room at one of the new Indian-owned California resorts, but modern telecommunications being what it is, some things can easily be done anywhere. In this case, Eolis was balancing the demands of two very different kinds of challenges, all of them involving very big deals.

With the business calls eventually out of the way she was ready to prepare for the other big deals. These would be at one of the Pachanga Resort’s poker tables where she was one of the invited participants in a made-for-television poker game that will be aired on the GSN cable channel later this fall.

Eolis is a relative late comer to the world of big time poker. Didn’t start playing until she was 40 and that was 20 years ago. She has been a regular at the World Series of Poker for a number of years, twice finishing in the money in the WSOP’s main event and has traveled to other big poker events as business schedules permit. She’s the only woman to ever win the European No limit Hold ‘em Tournament and has been seen on television in other invitation-only poker action such as the project that recently had her flying crosscountry to Pechanga.

How did Eolis come to be a player who warrants invites to big time poker action of this sort?

Desire and curiosity had a lot to do with it.

The New York City resident owns a “first” that will never be trumped by succeeding generations of women. She was the first woman to finish in the money at the World Series of Poker. This was 1986, a period when the World Series was considerably less co-ed than it is now and the women who gave it a try were often rewarded with a combination of flinty-eyed stares, smirks and what-have-you.

Poker has come a long way since then. So has Eolis. As for the way it began, she rolls the question around in her mind, searching for just the right entry point to a story she’s told many times before.

“I was on an airplane. This was 1984, with a man named Oswald Jacoby, a great bridge master and backgammon expert. It was just circumstances that we were sitting together on this flight from London to New York.”

They got to chatting, as seat companions on long flights often do. She asked him to tell her about backgammon. He did and at some point she remembers saying that she was looking for an interesting new hobby.

Would Jacoby have any suggestions? Turns out that he did. He gave her the address and name of a place called The Mayfair Club. She recalls Jacoby describing it as a “very posh club” where she would be able to find some excellent backgammon lessons.

Eolis thanked him and went on her way. “Not long after that I decided to look up the Mayfair .”

What she found there was the chance to play backgammon and bridge with “some of the great experts of the world.”

Turned out, however, that backgammon was not going to be her next big hobby, smiling about that now. “It took me about 20 minutes to discover that I should reserve backgammon for emergencies only. I had absolutely no feel for the game.”

But simply giving up did not seem like the thing to do, so she began lessons and kept them up for about four weeks, until the day she decided enough was enough.

Time to move on.

And she began to scan the landscape of her life in search of other options. “Lo and behold in the same Mayfair Club I began to be aware of people to talking about having a poker game.”

Eolis perked up, telling someone, “This looks like the game for me because I already know I have card sense.”

She remembers approaching the people in charge of this particular Mayfair venture, telling them to deal her in. “This was without me having a single hand of poker in my background or being precisely certain what an ante or a blind was.”

By the way, what was this first game, does she remember? “I sure do,” like someone telling a joke on herself. “it was something called hold ‘em and I decided I should try and look and act the part although it was easy for everyone to see that I had not one clue about what was going on.”

Card sense, she quickly realized, was not the same as having knowledge about the game being played.

It was a two-five no limit hold ‘em game . . . whatever that might mean, a bigger game than she expected to play but Eolis was not one to flinch at the prospect of an interesting learning experience.

“It was really rather amusing. This was a self-dealt game and I had no idea how the cards were dealt. After a couple of days of playing this to no avail, I decidedto take a trip up to the Catskills where my dad had played poker when I was a child.”

She found the poker room she was looking for, parked herself there and spent a night of “running around” talking to all the right people, learning about antes and blinds and generally feeling like she was on the right road to acquiring a lot of valuable insight.

The following night she played - it was a seven-card stud game - won seventeen dollars and decided she just about had this poker thing down pat.

“So I came back to New York, went back to the Mayfair and the hold ‘em game. By now I knew all about blinds and antes but clearly, I didn’t know what the game was.”

Which did not seem like that big a deal, except that it was. She played carefully, tightly, didn’t crash and burn and ended up winning a little. Eolis went home realizing there was still a lot of learning to do and called the manager of the Mayfair asking if he could point her toward a library of good poker books.

“He said he could give me one book,” which is how Eolis happened on that day in 1984 to acquire her first copy of Doyle Brunson’s Super System which was, asit still is, one of the most respected how-to tomes ever published by anyone on the subject of poker.

Eolis took it home and began reading and re-reading all that Doyle and the authors of each chapter had to say. “I stayed with this book until I could at least recite all the contents even if I could not understand what they meant.”

But Eolis was still a fast and dedicated student, as she was in college when she was earning a degree in philosophy, as she was when she founded a private placement firm for lawyers at the age of 24. Poker became a challenge that absorbed her. She bounced between limit and no limit games for a number of weeks, enjoying the game but not translating that into a lot of success.

Matters took a turn after the 1985 World Series. “The boys were back in New York from Las Vegas,” she recalls, “the seasoned players who were accustomed to going out there and banging heads.”

The Mayfair game was revived in a big way and Eolis guesses that some of the regulars were licking their chops, hoping she would drop by . . . hopefully with some money.

Sure enough, she got there and was invited to sit down. Onone side was a guy who introduced himself as Jay. Eolis was dealt a hand and found herself looking at a pair of 3s.

“I remembered from Doyle’s book that a pair, even a pair of 3s is better than an ace-king, so I was very comfortable with my little pair and when I was raised I had no qualms about calling. Anyway, by the end of the hand I had won a biiiig four-way pot.”

Talk about your lifechanging moments.

“The next thing I know, the gentleman named Jay sitting next to me looks at me. Gives me a friendly look and says, ‘Sweetheart, you don’t belong in this game.’ Me, I’m sitting there thinking how can this be. Look at what I just won and this Jay guy, he’s telling me I don’t belong here.”

That was her first meeting with Jay Heimowitz who, as she would learn, already had an enviable reputation as a high stakes player from the Mayfair to the tables of the World Series. Before the day was over they agreed to sit down, chat, have some coffee and talk poker.

“We became very good friends and he became my mentor in no limit hold ‘em.” Other regulars in the Mayfair games of the mid- 1980s included people such as Howard Lederer, Erik Seidel and Dan Harrington. Collectively, they were headed for big things in Las Vegas.

That one game with its pair of 3s and her friendship with Heimowitz helped launch the sequence of events that brought Eolis to her first World Series some 10 months later in 1986. Heimowitz won his first World Series bracelet (signifying first place) that year in one of the preliminary hold ‘em tournaments and Eolis prodded by Heimowitz decided she was going to play in the main event, the $10,000 buy-in no limit hold ‘em championship.

“He told me I should do it. I told him he was crazy.” They went back and forth like that, until Eolis tells Heimnowitz for about she third time that he’s crazy, but . . .

“I’m going to do it.”

And she did, leveraging her curiosity and sense of adventure into a first that will be hers forever.

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