Follow-up, October 18, 2026: Our October 12 report examines JOPT’s revised public prize wording. The revised description did not establish whether the gift-set contents changed. Vicky Shiu’s original commentary below addresses the presentation of the prizes before that follow-up.
I want to see more companies putting money into women’s poker. I also want women who sit down at a poker table to be treated as poker players first.
That is why the reaction to the Japan Open Poker Tour’s upcoming Ladies Championship should not be dismissed as people being overly sensitive about condoms.
The ¥30,000 Ladies Championship takes place in Tokyo on October 12 and is sponsored by Japanese condom manufacturer Sagami. As part of the sponsorship, the top three finishers are set to receive Sagami product packages alongside other merchandise. The problem is what those packages originally looked like.
According to the prize details published before they were changed, first place was due to receive 150 condoms and three bottles of lubricant. Second place was allocated 80 condoms and three bottles of lubricant, while third would receive 40 condoms and one bottle.
This Is Not About Being Offended by Condoms
There is an important distinction to make here because it is very easy for this story to become cheap outrage.
Condoms are normal sexual-health products. There is nothing embarrassing about buying them, using them or a company that makes them sponsoring a poker tournament.
Sagami also has an interesting history. The company says its founder, Saku Matsukawa, was motivated by the consequences of unwanted pregnancies and became involved in producing condoms in Japan during the 1930s.
That is hardly a company women should automatically find objectionable. The problem is the execution.
Someone decided that the best way to reward the women finishing first, second and third in a poker tournament was to assign them increasingly enormous piles of condoms according to their finishing position. That feels very different from having Sagami sponsor the tournament, provide samples at the venue or support an initiative around sexual health.
Women Are There to Play Poker
As a woman who writes about poker, this is the part that bothers me most.
Women’s events exist partly because poker remains overwhelmingly male. They create another route into live poker for women who might otherwise look across a packed tournament room, see very few people like themselves and decide it is not somewhere they particularly want to spend their time.
That means organizers have to think carefully about the environment they create.
I recently covered Renee Xie becoming the first woman to win a GUKPT Main Event. Her achievement mattered because the story was about a poker player breaking through in one of British poker’s longest-running tours.
That is what progress looks like.
The ambition should be to reach a point where seeing women winning major poker tournaments is completely ordinary. Turning a women-only event into a viral story about how many condoms its champion receives does very little to move us towards that point.
The Winner Is Not Just Receiving Condoms
It is also important not to exaggerate what JOPT is offering. This is not a tournament where somebody pays ¥30,000, beats the entire field and discovers that her only reward is a suitcase containing 150 condoms.
JOPT lists the Ladies Championship with a total prize value of approximately $10,817, with the Sagami products included as additional sponsored prizes. Other items are also being awarded to leading finishers.
That context matters. But it does not make the original decision particularly sensible. If anything, it raises the question of why somebody did not look at the prize list before publication and wonder how it would be received.
Players Are Already Voting With Their Feet
The criticism has not come only from people outside the event.
HarunA, who previously won a JOPT Ladies Championship, said publicly that she would not participate this time. Another player said she had cleared her schedule for the event but had now decided not to play.
That should concern JOPT far more than a few jokes on social media. A ladies event succeeds by making women want to enter it.
If the sponsorship attached to that event instead causes women to withdraw, something has gone badly wrong.
Sponsorship Is Good for Women’s Poker
I do not want the lesson from this to be that brands should avoid women’s poker because somebody might complain.
I want the opposite.
Bring in more sponsors. Put more money into women’s events. Create satellites, added prizes, travel packages, coaching opportunities and pathways into bigger open tournaments. Give women reasons to play more poker!
There would have been plenty of ways for Sagami to be involved without the sponsored prizes becoming the main talking point. A modest product pack for every entrant, an optional giveaway or simply conventional merchandise would have attracted considerably less attention.
The quantities and the podium-based distribution changed the tone completely.
JOPT Can Still Get This Right
The current Sagami announcement refers more generally to “product gift sets,” and reports indicate that the detailed quantities were removed from JOPT’s public listing after criticism began. That gives the tour an opportunity.
JOPT can listen to the women it wants to attract, reconsider how the sponsored prizes are presented and make the conversation about poker again.
There is a genuinely positive story buried underneath all of this. A large poker tour has found a title sponsor prepared to support a dedicated women’s tournament, while a company founded by a pioneering Japanese woman is putting its name behind women competing in poker.
That should have been the story, instead, we are talking about 150 condoms.
Women’s poker deserves sponsors. It deserves investment, bigger events and more attention.
Most of all, the women playing those events deserve to be treated first and foremost as poker players.
