Charlie Carrel – "So Ben's sitting there, he's doing a Q&A with his audience. I've done tons of them myself, and you're answering a bunch of different questions. Somebody asks why women aren't succeeding so much in poker as men, and Ben's reaction is, "I know this is going to anger a lot of people. The Karens out there are probably going to get mad, but there are some biological distinctions between men and women, some tendencies between men and women psychologically that men just have the upper hand in a bunch of different ways."
Ben Rolle/Bencb – "I said that they're simply more competitive."
C – "So, a completely normal thing to say.
But, this then got screenshotted and posted on Twitter, and because that then blew up, everyone accused Ben of rage-baiting.
Rage baiting is essentially just throwing out a hook, like a little maggot on a fishing rod of rage, so everyone, all the fish, come and flock to it so you get more attention, so you get more views and things like that.
Instagram stories is like the least rage-baity place to ever do anything, ever, so it was complete nonsense."
B – "There was even a guy who accused this in the comments, and I tried to explain to him – the worst format to choose to get views and attention is Instagram stories."
C – "There's no virality in it."
B – "He kept arguing with me."
C – "People in the poker world went bananas at you, and it was a lot of women and a lot of men speaking for women, saying that Ben was a sexist, a misogynist. And it didn't just stop there, it wasn't just like, "Hey, I think this is sexist." It's like, "He's a bad person," and then it just got mean.
(Here's Bencb's response to his Instagram story on Twitter)
I really don't care. I can take the heat. I will share my opinion even if it upsets people because they cannot handle reality.
— bencb (@bencb789) June 23, 2024
I know very well what is going on here. Someone sees a controversial topic and takes the opportunity to farm engagement with zero logic, twisting things… https://t.co/1ApIIXK2BB
I think it was Jamie Kerstetter that was like, "If you could see how much we're bitching about this guy in our group chats," you know, something like that. The level of vitriol, the hatred, and misandry that was directed at you, like sexism against men, was insane.
Because of the dynamics of the social media platforms at the moment, people really didn't want to speak too much on your side because being called sexist sucks. I did, I definitely did."
B – "Thank you, brother. I appreciate it bro."
C – "I've been toughened up. I've been canceled a few times myself, and you know, it's just one of these things where the people that were speaking, I know they weren't, most of them weren't coming from a good place. They're not coming from a place of truly caring about equality, it's coming from a place of hurt and anger and pain and whatever else it is. You were just making a very normal and true point. Men tend to be more competitive biologically, psychologically, socially, whatever the reasons are, and there are huge differences between the way that men and women interact. I'll go a step further if people want to cancel me on this, and I said this in a rant, but the smartest person I've ever met, most powerful person I've ever met, most intellectual poker player I've ever met – all women. And that's a coincidence, it doesn't have to be like that, it just happens to be that in my life these are the people that I've met. I take so much inspiration from women in my life.
I've also been a poker coach and coached thousands of people in groups and one-on-one, and on average, men are better at poker than women. I'm just going to put it out there."
B – "How horrible of you."
C – "I know, it's an awful thing for me to say, but then the women that do manage to make it obviously have got characteristics.
Here's the thing: you don't need to look at groups, to separate it into men and women to begin with. It can be useful to ask how we get more women in poker, how we make them feel more comfortable, because harassment is definitely a huge thing in poker for women. But at the same time, when you're actually just looking at an individual, you don't need to be like, "Oh, this is a woman so she's going to be good or she's going to suck." It's just like, this is a person, she happens to be intellectual, she happens to be competitive.
This is something that really tickles my balls when it comes to the rage online, that people just can't separate this identity politics, this group fighting – men versus women, black versus white. I like that we're having these conversations because as poker players, we're meant to be pretty smart. We're not meant to be the dumbest fish in the barrel, and we can at least raise the bar of expectations of how nuanced these discussions can be."
B – "I have to fully agree with you, and I think, I mean, I certainly haven't read every single comment, but everything I have read had nothing to do with my initial points. Even some people tried to be really smart about it, like, "Oh yeah, because you also have more men participating in tournaments." Well, exactly my point, right?
And then people say, "Yeah, you dummy, you don't even understand basic statistics." If in a tournament of a thousand players and there are 900 men, obviously there are going to be more men in the top ranking.
Well, you're just proving my point – men are more competitive, signing up for it. Now then you have people saying, "Well, in live tournaments, there's more harassment for women. That's why they're not signing up." That is the reason." All right, cool. Then I guess if we look at other games like online poker, it should draw a different picture.
I don't find a woman in the top 100, again, which I think is nothing bad. It's just that men, we can sit there 12 months not going out, not seeing sunlight, pissing in a bottle."
C – "We're disgusting!"
B – "We're disgusting human beings, and that leads to those results. I think women don't understand if we have a goal in mind, we're turning into freaking psychopaths. They just don't understand that. Have you seen this?"
C – "Our mommies didn't love us so much that we need to prove ourselves so hard."
B – "There was something interesting that Alex Hormozi said like, it's not that we have something that someone else does not have when it comes to becoming incredibly successful, it's something we're lacking. We just can't stop. We have this constant feeling we're not doing enough, we need to do more, we need to prove ourselves more, we need more validation.
Your point, it comes from a bad childhood. I also had my things I needed to deal with, my trauma, and a lot of guys I speak to, it stems from something. Then we see an opportunity to become successful, to get this validation, and it's different for everyone.
Then we just turn into this freaking grinding, in-the-bottle-pissing psychopath. Grinding one solver after another, back in the day it was a piece of paper and writing down the ranges. We just couldn't stop. We would be dreaming, living it. I didn't care about GTO, I didn't care about girls, I just did my studies on the side and then the rest just went into poker.
If I look at my poker friends back in the day, they were all so dedicated. Maybe everyone had a bit of a different level of dedication, but sometimes we sacrificed our social life for it in order to get a better life in the future.
I think this is what women maybe don't understand, that level of craziness and dedication we can get. This is what I mean by simply being a little bit more competitive. The thing is, I don't even argue that there are certain social constructs, right? The way you're a boy, you're doing this; you're a girl, you're doing this. Maybe it has gotten too far, maybe there are certain things that need to be reconsidered, and everyone has a different opinion on that. It's definitely a conversation we can have.
But until today, nobody can prove to me or bring up any rational arguments why, in online poker [there aren't more women]. There are no entry barriers! If that's really an argument, why don't we see more women succeeding in online poker?
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Why is it the same in esports? There was one guy saying, "Yeah, there's harassment." Have you ever been playing competitive ranked lobbies as a guy? If you don't shoot, if you don't... you're being insulted. If you have an accent, there's racism. You're being bullied all the time. It's crazy. I just feel like women always think it's just for them.
Yeah, there is sexism. Yes, 100%, and it needs to be tackled and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be fixed. Women have their problems, men have their problems, and this is just something that I think is, as you mentioned, that men are simply more competitive. So, we endure these things, we just grind until we succeed."
C – "And there are some women that are just as competitive, it's just less frequent.
I think it's really important to point out that psychological differences stem from social differences and social differences stem from psychological differences. People were disaggregating those two things. They're like, "It's not psychological, it's just purely social." Well, it's like when social things happen on scale, that causes psychological differences between men and women on average. So you can't have one without the other. So if you think that there are social things that need to be tackled, then there are going to be psychological differences within these things.
Where this all stems from, as you and I both know, is what people call the woke movement. I don't care what we call it, the movement that has been described as wokeness. A large part of it was trying to combine and unify men and women, but in a completely non-truthful way. I think a lot of people have good intentions trying to bring people together, but they were painting men and women as absolutely equal psychologically.
If you said that to somebody, a Buddhist or Shaman from Brazil, they'd be like, "What?" And it wouldn't even be like, "Hey, that's just not true." It'd be like, it could be offensive to a lot of them because they'd say, "Well, no, the divine feminine," as they would say it, or the yin, or the divine masculine, or the yang, they have different qualities. Men and women, from their perspective, have different ratios of masculinity and femininity, and that's to be celebrated, not commiserated.
Men are meant to have different types of intelligence and women are meant to have other types of intelligence. Women are meant to have a deeper intuition for the world, like a more whole intuition. Women are meant to be more in tune with nature and more in tune with their bodies and sensuality and all of these things.
This is why so many of the most intelligent people I've ever met have been women. It's not always that they can exactly rationalize, and some of them can, like my teacher – she's way more rational than me – but it's not like they can always exactly rationalize their perspective. But when you alchemize the lessons that they've brought down through their feminine intuition, it's so much deeper and so much grander than anything that you'll get from the kind of masculine intuition.
Again, this isn't men and women. I've got feminine intuition, so do you. Everyone's got both, but it's just ratios and it's just averages, it's probabilities and things like that. That's where you see at the highest levels of esports, the highest levels of chess, like top 100 chess players in the world – all men. Because, when you have a certain ratio of this masculine-feminine energy and you have certain proclivities of intellect and you take that to the extremes (like Jordan Peterson was always saying, you take the small differences on the averages to the extremes), then you see all of the most aggressive people in the world tend to be men. All of the hyper-intellectuals tend to be men. All of the dumbest people in the world tend to be men."
B – "100%."
C – "And so this is one of the reasons that you'll see these things."
B – "What really annoys me is then I've had from both sides people message... To be honest, what I also have to mention is the enormous amount of people messaging me and saying, "Ben, I see it exactly like you." Big creators, big, big, big names, just, "I just don't want to get involved in that shit, but keep it up, man."
C – "I had that so much during my cancellations as well."
B – "You know what my problem is? Next to all the studies and people trying to say, "My study here, my study there," we could come on a podcast and break down hundreds of studies. Just let's use logic, right?
Answer me the question: What are the entry barriers for women competing at online poker or similar games? As I mentioned with esports, we men, we're also facing racism, bullying... Like, everyone who has been playing, whether it's ranked PUBG or ranked Valorant, whatever, like every second game is toxic as fuck for men as well."
C – "And we get fewer people sticking up for us..."
B – "Exactly."
C – "I've noticed that, and I will say that on average I think women experience more harassment than men in poker. Just having female friends, you know, especially attractive women and more conventionally unattractive women as well, they get harassed for their looks and stuff like that. Sexual harassment is pretty extreme, it's really, really extreme.
I had a female streamer – I mentioned this in the post where I was standing up for you – I have a friend who was a female streamer and another streamer, it was a Russian guy, he was literally masturbating on his stream watching her stream.
I don't know who this is, and if I did, I would definitely say his name, but that type of thing is wild. I've had other friends who, whenever she went to a casino, she would get like followed home or people just coming on to her and stuff like that. So there are some huge issues.
B – "But you know what, the lefties and the wokies... and I understand that my story may have stirred some emotions, but the thing is, you can just predict it. You can predict their behavior of being irrational, being loud, yelling, accusing you of being a racist, white supremacist, misogynist, whatever. It's so predictable because that's all they have. It's so simple, it's so easy to predict.
You know what the problem is? What they don't understand is that the behavior of men doing this kind of shit is if they cannot handle their emotions, if they're weak. If they have these urges and they have to live it out, they cannot control it. Like, "Oh, she is hot, yeah, maybe I should not jerk off to it on stream," or "Maybe I should not say these things on stream." A masculine, strong man, stoic man – that masculinity that is so frowned upon is what keeps men thinking about their actions. Like, "Oh, there's a hot woman, but I better don't say [anything]... I just embrace it, you know. I look at her and then I move on."
You know, "This motherf***ershit just cut me off the street, I would like to punch him in the face, but you know we're not going to do that." That anger, being attracted to a woman, or whatever it is, being tilted in poker, you know, facing a bad beat, I would like now to punt it off, but I would lose my bankroll, so we're not doing it. We're playing our A-game.
So just constantly execute your A-game, whether you're in live, maybe a solid B-game some days, or solid C-game when we don't have our best days, but we just do it regardless.
This is what those lefties and wokies don't want to understand, that everything bad comes from people not being able to manage and control their emotions. We also, you and I, we also experience those emotions, but we can control it. We say, "All right, we better don't do that, otherwise it will have some drastic repercussions."
Being aggressive or being able to work really hard, you know, these are not bad things. I think a man needs to be mentally strong, ideally also physically strong. But this is what they don't want to understand. Just, you know, act on your feelings, you know, body positivity and all that crap. It's like, you see what happens, you know, people stabbing each other because they just can't help themselves anymore. We just get so brain-rotten. Weak.
Charlie's Woke Phase
C – "Let me make a confession. About 10 years ago, I, Charlie Carrel, got a little bit woke. Before woke was even a thing.
Here's how it happened... and I wasn't the best cult member, but I definitely got got.
So about 10 years ago, I decided that I wanted to be a good person, which sounds crazy to most people. But I was a nihilist before, I didn't believe in good and bad. So about 10 years ago, I changed my mind and I was like, "You know, actually I feel like the best way to live life is to be a good person." Thank God I didn't do anything awful by that point, but hopefully something inside of me was telling me not to.
I looked to a friend, and I won't say... he was a he back then, she is now a she... or a they. You know what, I'll call him he because it's past [tense]."
B – "But it's like, really a he?"
C – "Biological man turns non-binary, turned woman, turned don't know what they are now. But a very good friend of mine. Hyper-rational, hyper-compassionate, hyper-open, very traumatized person. I looked to them as a beacon of rationality and compassion and ethics as well.
They were like super into the woke [culture] before woke was even a talking point. So I got not only all of the expressions from him, but he also had a wife who was also they. They were studying gender something at a PhD level, so I was getting like cutting-edge theory brought down to me, and it sounded very convincing.
At first I was like, "Yeah, okay, this makes sense." You start seeing everything through the lens of man and woman. You see, "Oh, this is actually really unfair on women, how I'm doing this small thing," like, you know, I might be walking too fast on the street when women on average are shorter. It's just little tiny things like that, and it's everywhere because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the same for race and same for all things like that.
There was this attitude that I had that I was like, "I feel like I have to kind of call people out." That's the terminology that they use, like I have to call people out to bring justice back into the world. Little did I know, that back then, I was in no position to be calling anybody out for anything because I was so traumatized myself, so unaware of my own tendencies, and that a lot of the joy or the validation I got from calling people out was coming from a hurt place.
It took me maybe a year to really get out of that again. I started really questioning and granulating details, and then I realized quickly that when you disagree with people that are in this woke ideological mindset, they don't stay kind. As soon as you have a small disagreement about anything and you're like, "Actually, no, I really feel like you're wrong about this," then they turn into a monster. I've seen it happen to many, many people that I used to call friends over the years.
It's the Jungian thing where you can kind of become an archetype, like this idea can exist and you can embody it so much that you kind of become it.
You're now just speaking as a puppet for this idea, and this is what's happening with so many of the people that have been taken over by the woke mindset. They're now just a puppet for this energy, this concept, this idea that floats through them. It's like the whole concept of "people don't have thoughts, thoughts have people," which is a Jungian quote, and it's so true. You watch it manifest in real life."
“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
― Carl Jung
If you disagree with this concept, with this bubble, this concept of energy, and say, "Actually... I think this little bit is wrong," their entire being just goes, "You're the bad guy," because this is who I am. When I saw the extremity of the reaction of the wokeness, then I was like, "Okay, this isn't who I am. I'm going to see if I can find ethics some other place." But what it has done is it's given me that year (or however long it was), gave me such a good insight into how these people's minds work because I was it. I got a little tickle from the woke virus."
B – "There are just so many discrepancies between what they want and what they demand. It's this full acceptance, and the moment you don't share the same opinion, it just turns into this hostility and absolute disgust towards the other person. It's just labeled as "You're racist, you're misogynist, you're sexist." This is what really frustrates me, that people these days use these terms left and right, just to discredit you. There's no foundation, it's just to discredit you to make yourself feel better.
That's a very normal phenomenon in psychology, in human evolution. In order to get this attention or validation, a very common coping mechanism is to discredit others. If you discredit others, you put yourself above them, it makes you feel better. You can see it today, and I have to say, even a guy like Justin Bonomo. When he attacked me as a misogynist and sexist, I saw his comments and I was like, "Yeah, you're not even addressing my points." To be honest, you're one of the reasons why these days I feel very sorry for real victims of misogyny and sexism, because they're not being taken seriously anymore.
If you're being called racist 10 years ago, you were like, "F***, what did I say?" Now it's like, "Yeah, tell me something new."
C – "I'll speak on behalf of Justin for a sec because I do agree with the criticisms that you have with him, but I will say I do like that he is willing to put himself out there for things that he believes in."
B – "I honestly have a lot of respect for that. I 100% agree. You can always have multiple truths being true at once, or multiple facts, true at once."
C – "Watching him go for the Palestine-Israel thing on Twitter is, I mean, it's inspirational to some extent. I think he's not coming from a healed place, I think he's coming from a very, very disarmed and hurt place, and I don't think that's a place that people should be speaking for the truth, usually.
But I will say that people go through these phases. We went through a BLM phase, we went through a trans phase, we went through a Ukraine phase. You'll get people that are like, "I support the thing," and "I support the next thing." But when somebody genuinely cares, then they stick with that thing and they don't just post a black square on their Instagram and pretend they care about black people. They might actually go out and try and help people all humans or maybe just a particular demographic of humans."
B – "It just reminded me about the Krissy B thing. You know, when she was running deep (and by the way I think she's fantastic) like I'm not just saying it, I was one of the few that defended her on Twitter. Not just because... but I like the way she played the hands! I genuinely liked it.
And people were just attacking her for punting away her tournament life. You know, all the women that attacked me for being a misogynist were like "Go girl! Go Krissy! Show them!" Then she punted it off and she was asked, why she [thinks] so few women run deep or are successful and she basically said what I said.
I didn't see Vanessa Kade saying "Oh GG. Unlucky you're out." Everyone was silent. All the women that attacked me and cheered for her were silent."
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