Few poker players, male or female, have burst onto the scene over the past few years quite like Cate Hall.
A former attorney, the 32-year-old Arizonan grabbed the spotlight quickly in her career with a WPT final table in Maryland in September 2015 and followed that up with two more WPT FTs within months.
Another final table at the same WPT event in Maryland a year later and a 3rd in the WPT 5 Diamond at the end of last year only served to brighten the spotlight.
Along the way Hall has unfortunately also had to spend a lot of her time defending her ground to sexist and personal attacks, either in person or on Twitter. And the barrage has been steady from the get-go.
Thankfully it hasn't kept her from speaking her mind or taking a controversial stance on something she believes in, though - much like when she 'ungratefully' accepted the GPI Female Player of the Year Award.
A few days after Hall defeated Mike Dentale 2-0 in a 'grudge' match, spurred on by Dentale's Twitter attacks, 888poker’s own Kara Scott discussed the match and its repercussions with her.
Check out an excerpt of the video below and watch the full clip below:
Kara Scott: Hi Kate. Congratulations, first of all, on your win. Now, a lot was made about how entertaining or not the matchup was for the viewers as though entertainment value was one of the main point of this, so how high does it rank for you coming into something like this, being entertaining?
Cate Hall: Yeah so, walking away from the match, I felt like ... I heard some people criticizing my personality and I was honestly pretty happy with that because in my experience people are always going to be criticizing something about me.
And usually it’s my play, so having it be my personality this time was sort of an improvement for me. My sort of approach to the match was...
I’m glad that people got some entertainment out of it and I realized that that was a lot of the value for other people, but for me it was an opportunity to showcase my ability to play and to earn money. Entertainment was sort of secondary for me.
KS: I heard you talking on Doug Polk's podcast and you said that one of the reasons you actually made the challenge was to hopefully get Mike Dentale commenting about you and your play online. Do you think that's going to work? Do you think there was ever a world where that would work?
CH: You know I think that he will find a way always to criticize me because he just hates me. But I think that when he does it in the future he's going to have to contend with a lot of people saying “ha-ha, what about queen-five?"
So, I think that I accomplished my goals as nearly as I could with this match.
Watch the full video interview below:
