When she's played in our rinky-dink, low-limit Thursday-night game, she's been a totally different player--a flirt who has one glass of wine and pretends she's had three, and then just as quickly the pro who tells the guys remaining in the pot precisely what they're holding just by how they've played their hands. (She has never once been wrong, which always seems to frighten the guy holding the superior hand into folding it.) She's ingratiating and intimidating at once, the prettiest girl ever to stack all of yourchips in front of her. Some guys are almost too delighted to lose to her. One Thursday-night regular, let's call him "Stan," seems to believe that he can buy Gowen's heart by giving her all his chips. She is, needless to say, hardly so easy.
"It's too early to tell how good she is," says McManus, who mentioned Gowen in a story that appears in the new issue of Esquire. "She's certainly good enough to hold her own at those events. She's very vivacious at the table, and she's an attractive woman. That's a factor. Poker's popularity is going to be spread in a number of ways. The main way is the lipstick cameras now enable the audience to know who's bluffing and who's fiddling the nuts, and the audience can much more easily identify with the action, so it becomes an entertainment experience and an educational experience. But the other reasons for its popularity are the psychological and physical interest in the players contesting the pots. These are human beings with interesting life stories who look a certain way, and if a woman is very easy on the eyes, that's going to be a factor in audience interest in the game--though, technically, it has nothing to do with who's going to win the hand or the tournament."
Max Gerber
Clonie Gowen
Max Gerber
Face cards, or scenes from the World Poker Tour's Celebrity Invitational, clockwise from top left: Ben Affleck; Tobey Maguire (in cap and shades) with Arliss' Robert Wuhl; Spin City's Richard Kind with The Man Show's Adam Carolla; Drew Pinsky flanked by Howard Lederer, left, and Chris "Jesus" Ferguson; Jeremy Sisto with Jon Favreau; and Clonie Gowen with Andrea Parker, who busted Gowen out of the tourney.
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But Gowen doesn't want to be the Anna Kournikova of the poker world--the pretty face who brings in the fellas, and maybe a few young women, and rakes in the sponsorship money but has nothing to prove her worth besidesher looks. She's delighted that Keith Fleer is out there chasing down the mainstream money. She's delighted to have just signed a deal with FullTiltPoker.com, a new Web site due to launch during the World Series of Poker in May, where she will join Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, Erik Seidel, Phil Ivey and other greats doling out advice and playing online games against subscribers to the site. She's delighted to have one of the Los Angeles card rooms courting her, hoping to land her as one of their representatives.
But if she doesn't win, be it at a table in a Dallas card room or at a WPT event in France or the World Series of Poker in Vegas, all of that other stuff won't mean anything. To the pros, she'll be a pretty face in the right place at the right time and nothing more. And to herself, Clonie Gowen will be someone who played the right hand the absolutely wrong way.
"Keith's ambitions for me, well, if that stuff happens, great," she says. "But my main goal is I want to play poker. If that other stuff happens, oh, it's wonderful. But bottom line is I am not an actress. It's always good to dream and have goals, but I didn't get into poker to become a famous whatever. I play poker to play poker. Sure, who wouldn't want a contract with Revlon? Who wouldn't want to be a spokesperson for some big company? It would be fabulous if it happened.
"But the bottom line is you better win, or you're going to have your critics that say the only reason why you got there is because you're good-looking, that you can't play a lick of poker. Any time that you are attractive and a woman, you better win. You better win."
