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Annie Duke used to be a party of one. In the early days of the poker
television boom, Annie Duke was the go to female player. If you needed to
get an interview, you went to Annie (she was prominently featured in an
Entertainment Weekly article about Hollywood's obsession with poker). If you
wanted a picture to represent the explosion of poker, Annie was your girl.
If you wanted proof that in poker the girls can give as good as the boys,
you talked to Annie. Annie Duke was one of the first stars of the
post-Moneymaker poker landscape, a lone female presence in a sea of men. But
recently things have changed. Now there is Evelyn Ng and Clonie Gowan and
Isabelle Mercier, poker babes with some serious game.
Annie Duke is a compelling figure. She was raised in a scholarly family and
she originally sought out a much different career path. She was attending
the University of Pennsylvania, in pursuit of a degree in psycholinguistics.
There was only one problem, and that was that she was utterly miserable. So,
she turned to her brother for advice, and he suggested that she follow in
his footsteps. Her brother happens to be Howard Lederer, one of the best
poker players in the world, and a man who loves teaching the game. Howard
taught Annie how to be a poker player, and she soon started building a name
for herself in underground poker rooms on the east coast.
Annie Duke has turned the table on the chauvinistic men she encounters at
the poker table. The legendary Amarillo Slim says, "Women can do a lot of
things we can't do, but I'm not real enthused about lady poker players."
This is exactly the kind of attitude that Duke exploits. She says, "I think
women are better readers in general, I actually do. I think men find women
hard to read and women don't find men hard to read." Her results speak to
this insight. In 2004 she became the first woman to win a WSOP bracelet,
taking first place and $137,000 in the $2,000 Omaha Hi-Lo Split. In fact,
Duke is the leading money winner among women in the WSOP history. She has
also finished tenth in the 2000 WSOP Main Event and 4th in the 2005 WSOP
$5,000 Limit Hold'Em Event. In September of 2004, she took home the
$2,000,000 first prize at the WSOP Tournament of Champions.
Annie Duke is also a working mother, just like any other. She has four
children and they come first in her life. If there is a conflict between
playing poker and her kids, the kids come first. She will always be at their
school plays if they fall on the same night as a poker game. Duke says her
family life helps her keep perspective at the table. Duke also has a
lucrative side gig teaching poker to Ben Affleck. One can only hope that her
lessons pay off and Affleck is able to change careers.
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