Top of the list of poker feuds, however, has to go to the Negreanu-Annie Duke affair, a mostly online exchange which was actually a tag-team battle of sorts, Negreanu apparently with Jennifer Harman at his back, while Howard ‘The Professor’ Lederer championed his sister Annie’s cause. The Life of Annie Duke. When it comes to high profile women poker players, Annie Duke definitely fits the bill.This smart-talking, hugely popular and highly talented poker player comes from a family of skilled gamers, including her brother, the equally famed poker player, Howard Lederer.

When it comes to high profile women poker players, Annie Duke definitely fits the bill. This smart-talking, hugely popular and highly talented poker player comes from a family of skilled gamers, including her brother, the equally famed poker player, Howard Lederer. Duke her taken her talents to mainstream media and is perhaps one of the most recognized of all professional poker players today.

The Early Years

Born in 1965, Annie Duke’s childhood experiences of growing up in board-games crazy household has become something of a legend, and she regularly credits her teacher-parents’ love for skilled thinking pastimes for her and her brother’s success. Duke matriculated at Columbia U and then went on to become a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. In the middle of her doctorate degree, Duke decided on a whim to marry her old time pal, Ben Duke and move to Colorado. There, she hit the poker rooms in a bid to make money to pay the household bills, and her love for the competitive edge of poker blossomed.

Moving into the Big World

Duke made a very impressive start into the professional world of poker after trying out her first World Series of Poker event in 1994. While she entered just for the experience, it was soon clear that her talent for the game was on par with some of the top pros out there and she finished 13th in her first tournament. Her victory was bitter sweet as she knocked out her own brother in the game. Duke’s prize of over $70K put her on the road to professional poker, and she and her husband made the move from Colorado to Vegas so that she could be closer to the big poker rooms in the city.

Poker Career

Annie Duke continued to make waves in the poker industry as its brightest up and coming star, and she moved fast up the rungs to become a legend in her own right. At the 2000 Main Event, a heavily pregnant Duke reached 10th place in the 2000 Main Event of the WSOP which was the best win for a woman up until that time.

In 2004:
2004 stands out as a great year for Duke as she won her first World Series of Poker bracelet, beating a field of 234 players in the $2000 Omaha Hi/Lo Split event. She was one of only three women (besides Kathy Liebert and Cyndy Violette) to win an open even in that year’s World Series of Poker tournament.

In that same year, Annie Duke went on to beat top professionals, including her brother once more, Phil Hellmuth and Doyle Brunson, in the invitations only WSOP Tournament of Champions in the No Limit Texas Hold ‘em event and took home an incredible $2 million. Duke therefore became the first woman to reach top spot in two major poker tournaments and prestige was all that much greater as the two events took place only one month apart from each other.

In 2006:
Duke won the World Series of Rock Paper Scissors annual charity event, hosted by Phil Gordon. Her prize was free entry into the WSOP Main Event, with all proceeds of the competition donated to cancer charities.

In 2010:
Duke went on to win the National Heads Up Poker Championship, earning herself $500,000, plus the prestige of the title, as well as becoming the first woman in the championship’s history to do so. Only some of the top players in the work have won this tournament, including Chris Ferguson, Paul Wasicka and Phil Hellmuth.

In total, Duke has made 15 final tables at the World Series of Poker and cashed 37 times (written 2010).

Entry into the Media Mainstream

Annie Duke saw that her huge success as a female player had massive potential and she set out to market herself as a brand. In 2005, she and her brother Howard promoted video poker games that feature themselves as characters. She also went on to endorse the ESPN Poker Club line of products, making her a face of the group.

Duke used her vast experience in the online and offline poker world to write articles for poker websites, specifically on her favorite topic, Omaha Hi Lo.

Duke also penned her autobiography: “Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker.”

She is also heavily involved in the endorsement of Ultimate Bet online poker room.

The Apprentice

Duke has appeared on the Ellen Degeneres show, as well as Celebrity Apprentice, where she came face to face with the sharp-tongued Joan Rivers in the final. Rivers made the mistake of bad mouthing poker players and Duke used the public platform to support the community that she represents. “I think it is so interesting that the group that has come out the most strongly in support of the show and in support of these charities, poker players, are so vilely disparaged by Joan on the show,” Duke said in her blog at the time. “Joan saying that all poker players have no last names and are worse than white trash is like me saying that all comedians are miserable, depressed people who take their angst, anger and unhappiness out on everyone around them. Clearly, that would be unfair.”

Private Life

A divorced Annie Duke moved from Vegas to the Hollywood Hills with her four children, Maud, Leo, Lucy and Nelly, and continues to live there with her boyfriend, the actor Joe Reitman. She has often said that when she retires from professional poker, she hopes to become a college professor; however that dream still seems long off as she continues to remain a constant presence on the poker circuit.

Annie Duke

Conclusion

Annie Duke’s name is clearly synonymous not only with top female poker player, but also top poker player, period. Her achievements at the tables, and her efforts to elevate poker to the heights of popularity and respect are to be truly commended.

Author:Joseph Falchetti (twitter)
(C) Copyright PokerWebsites.com, 2018

Most poker players didn’t go to graduate school for cognitive linguistics. Then again, most poker players aren’t Annie Duke.

After pursuing a psychology Ph.D. on childhood language acquisition, Duke turned her skills to the poker table, where she has taken home over $4 million in lifetime earnings. For a time she was the leading female money winner in World Series of Poker history, and remains in the top five. She’s written two books on poker strategy, and next year will release a book called Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.

Don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well.

In it, Duke parlays her experience with cards into general lessons about decision making that are relevant for all of us. If a well-reasoned decision leads to a negative outcome, was it the wrong decision? How do we distinguish between luck and skill? And how do we move beyond our cognitive biases?

Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, sat down with Duke in October to talk to her about life and poker.

How did you get into science?

From when I was very young I set out on an academic path. My parents were both teachers. My dad taught at a small private school in New England. My mother taught at the local public school until she had babies. (It was the ’60s, and that was the usual path for women then.) I grew up on the campus of the school and then went to Columbia. When I entered Columbia I thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps and major in English and go on to graduate school. In my family, it was really this idea of, “Where are you going to go to graduate school?” not “if.” I ended up double majoring in English and psychology. The whole time I was at Columbia, I worked in Barbara Landau’s lab as a research assistant. She was looking at first language acquisition, which was a topic I fell in love with—it’s what I ended up actually studying when I went to graduate school.

What interested you in language acquisition?

You end up studying kind of the whole ecosystem of what learning looks like. What’s the brain doing that it can learn this very, very complex system so quickly? A 1-year-old does very well with new languages, and that’s interesting in terms of brain plasticity and learning. Then there’s the question of how a baby figures out what goes with what. There are a lot of noises flying around and the child has to figure out what are words and what aren’t. Nobody hands the child a map or a key. Then the child has to figure out where the boundaries are. How do you figure out what the end of a word is? How do you figure out what the end of a phrase is? It’s really thinking about this very uncertain system. So, I started off very young in my academic career saying, “I’m really interested in these sort of uncertain systems, and how you take feedback in an uncertain system and actually map it properly and try to learn from it.”

That’s the hidden information problem. We know the facts that we know, but there may be facts that we don’t know.

What was your approach in graduate school?

Landau sent me on my way to Penn to study with Lila and Henry Gleitman, whom she’d studied under. Lila was actually a student of Noam Chomsky, who argues that grammar is built into our brains just like math is. If you have this kind of access to the grammar, it narrows down the uncertainty in the system. I began looking at something called syntactic bootstrapping. The idea was that if the child has access to a built-in grammar, then you can get a long way to actually being able to bootstrap the meaning of words from that. I also looked at the rhythm of mothers’ speech to children to show that the rhythm actually mirrors the grammatical structure of the language. That means the child has access to the grammar through the rhythm of maternal speech.

How did you get into poker from academia?

Right at the end of graduate school I got sick. Landed in the hospital for two weeks. Had a very bad stomach problem. Didn’t figure out what was wrong with me for a long time. It’s something that sort of flares and goes, and flares and goes. But it was right as I was supposed to be going and doing all of my job talks. I called all the places I had job talks at and said, “You know what? I really need to wait a second because I’m sick.” So, I delayed everything until the next season. Just rescheduled. So, I went off and had this sort of year off in 1992. I’m like, “Okay. Well, now what am I going to do?” I started playing poker in that year, which sounds kind of crazy, but it’s actually not that accidental because my brother, when he was 18, had moved to New York to study chess. His name is Howard Lederer. And he had moved to New York to study chess with a grandmaster, and actually landed in a poker game along the way. He lost his college fund, which was $6,300, by the way, but that turned out to pay off really well. By the time he was 21, he was one of the best players in the world. By the time he was 23, he had made the final table of the World Series of Poker. So my brother made the suggestion, “You’ve got this time off and you need some money. Why don’t you try playing poker to make some money while you’re waiting to go back?” So, I did, and the wait was 20 years long.

Did you have an instant knack for poker?

I think that I had a big leg up. As part of my training in experimental psych, I had done a lot of statistics and probability work, which is really important to poker. I understood the rigor. And then I had done all this work on uncertainty, and I think that you have to deeply embed yourself in uncertainty in order to become good at poker. And then I also had the advantage of my brother who taught me all those lessons without me needing to lose my college fund like he had. He actually was incredibly helpful and really coached me. I spent a lot of time watching him play.

Howard Lederer

Do you think you were underestimated as a woman at the poker table, and could you use that to your advantage?

I started playing in Montana, weirdly, because during my time off I got married to a man whose family lived in Montana. So, we went and lived in Montana for a few years and I started playing in these little tiny bars. There was this bar called the Crystal Lounge, and a place across the way called the Monte Carlo. The Crystal Lounge had a poker room in the basement and it was sort of what you’d expect. Ranchers, people who were retired and were on disability, that kind of thing. I can’t imagine a lot of them are alive anymore, but if you could find one, I think they would tell you that I was the luckiest person that ever lived. They would not tell you I was any good. That was a big advantage, having them just think I was lucky.

Why is it that luck and skill can be so easily confused?

This is actually a topic that I go into very deeply in my book. I think about it the same way that I was thinking about the way you learn a first language. Now, what does a word apply to? Nobody gives you a map. Nobody tells you, “This was skill,” or, “This was luck.” Say you go through a green light and you get through safely. Was that skill or luck? Well, we know it’s some combination. Trying to figure out what combination is really hard. And that’s a very simple example. You get into these complex situations where the outcome is the result of multiple decisions. Sometimes the decision is incredibly remote from the outcome. I could make a decision about raising my kids or what my disciplinary style is when they’re 5, and not see the results until they’re 18. So, now they’re misbehaving when they’re 18—is it something that I did in the distant past? That gets very complicated. The problem is that you only have the outcome to look at.

You have to deeply embed yourself in uncertainty in order to become good at poker.

How should we deal with the fact that there is so much luck involved in decisions?

Wrap your arms around the uncertainty. Accept it. Know that the way things turn out has a lot of luck involved so don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well. Focus on process instead.

Say I have a fair coin. I can tell you exactly what the probability of heads or tails on the next flip is. But I can’t tell you what the next flip will be. That’s what accepting outcomes is like. Accepting that you don’t know if the coin will land heads or tails on the next flip. That means that if you offer me a $2-to-$1 gambling proposition on this coin, I should be willing to do that. Even if I lose the next 10 flips, that doesn’t mean that I made a bad decision. And I should strive to be happy that I made a good decision and not focus on the result. It’s a mindset thing.

In life, it’s usually even more complicated because in most real decisions we haven’t examined the coin. We don’t know if it is a fair coin, if it has two sides with a heads and tails on it and is weighted properly. That’s the hidden information problem. We can’t see everything. We haven’t experienced everything. We know the facts that we know, but there may be facts that we don’t know. Then the job of the decider is to reduce the uncertainty as much as they possibly can, but to understand that they’re always working within a range and they have limited control over how things turn out on any given try.

What mistakes do we make in evaluating our decisions?

There’s this word that we use in poker: “resulting.” It’s a really important word. You can think about it as creating too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision. You can’t use outcome quality as a perfect signal of decision quality, not with a small sample size anyway. I mean, certainly, if someone has gotten in 15 car accidents in the last year, I can certainly work backward from the outcome quality to their decision quality. But one accident doesn’t tell me much.

In chess, if I lose a game, it’s pretty certain that I made a bad decision somewhere and I can go look for it. That’s a totally reasonable strategy. But it is a very unreasonable strategy in poker. If I lose a hand, I may have played the hand literally perfectly and still lost because there’s this luck element to it. The problem is that we’re all resulters at heart. Think about the 2015 Super Bowl. The Seahawks are on the 1-yard line, they’re down by four, there’s 26 seconds left in the game, Pete Carroll has Russell Wilson throw and it’s intercepted. Do you remember what the headlines looked like the next day? “Worst play in Super Bowl history,” “What was he thinking?” “Idiot.” That kind of thing. But imagine it was caught—what do you think the headlines would have looked like then? The outcome was irrelevant to the decision quality. And just as a teaser, the decision quality was actually pretty brilliant. I won’t go into the details of why; you’ll have to read my book for that.

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