Poker Articles

Everybody has an Annie Duke story. This appeared on an online poker forum: On the first hand of the first event of the 2004 World Series, Annie Duke gets pocket kings. She ends up all-in before the flop against pocket eights. The flop comes eight-eight-blank. Annie glares at her opponent, says “F*** you!” and tells the dealer the same. Then she storms out of the tournament area. The original post concluded, “Apparently the WPT has polished her up but there are still some rough edges left.” The story generated more than fifty replies.

There is, however, one problem with the story. It never happened. Annie Duke was in Portland at the start of the 2004 World Series and skipped the first thirteen events. Urban legends become urban legends because they confirm things that aren’t true, things people want to believe out of fear or envy or prejudice. Members of the forum ignored messages from Michael O’Malley, working at the Series, and Erik Seidel, a friend and financial backer, that this never happened. In classic urban-legend fashion, people resorted to insisting on the impossible: “Then why don’t you set the record straight?” “If this story isn’t true, what really happened?” “If everyone is so sure what did NOT happen, why doesn’t someone tell us what DID?” “A number of people have said the story wasn’t true but none of them have said what did happen.” Some people defended the original story as possibly involving an Annie Duke look-a-like. The teller of the original story defended it as saying he heard it from a Chris Moneymaker look-a-like.

Duke has just written, with David Diamond, Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker (Hudson Street Press $24.95). The book will undoubtedly give Duke’s critics more ammunition. Autobiographies are, after all, by their nature self-congratulatory and self-promoting. Beyond that, however, ill-wishers are going to strike out. The book is a remarkably honest, frequently self-critical account of the life and games of Annie Duke. Readers are treated to a close-up view of how it feels to compete in (and win) a World Series of Poker event. And her description of her life story includes so many confessions of mistakes, fears, and uncertainties that she should be excused for occasionally reveling in her accomplishments.

The book alternates chapters between Duke’s experience of winning two poker tournaments (Omaha Hi-Lo at the 2004 World Series and the Tournament of Champions in the fall), and her life story. The best material focuses on how she won her first World Series bracelet. From the first chapter, you get the feeling of what it’s like playing in a World Series event: the need for intense focus while being bombarded with diversions. Tee-shirt hawkers on Freemont Street, autograph seekers, the overly-air-conditioned tournament area, familiar faces, TV cameras, reminders of recent failures and successes.

Duke and Diamond do an excellent job of communicating the strangeness of this environment, which is both overwhelming and, ironically, comforting. Annie Duke, we learn, has suffered from panic attacks for decades and the intensity required to bring all her resources to bear takes her mind away from the impulse to panic. (Annie vomits a lot in the book, hardly an accomplishment of someone trying to “pretty up” her life story.) Having spent a significant portion of the last two years on the floor at the World Series, I can tell you that the descriptions of the atmosphere are dead-on. If you have been there, reading the book brings those sensations back. If you haven’t, you are treated to the great reward of reading: experiencing a world beyond your own.

The Thin White Duke
Leo Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina by declaring, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In Annie’s family, that unhappiness manifested itself in competitiveness and achievement. Her family’s games-playing both abated and intensified it. She admits that she never learned to be a gracious winner or loser and pushed herself in a career she didn’t really want, and then detoured from it by marrying a man she didn’t really know.

It must be difficult when you are challenged to be original with your own life story. Katy Lederer wrote a book about it. People told it. Numerous ESPN segments have described it. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of newspaper and Internet articles have summarized it. I made my dime off it.

But her life still makes a compelling story and there is plenty of new information. Even Duke’s critics should be impressed (though I doubt they will be) by her candor. She admits to many mistakes, to initially thinking she was too selfish to have children, to sharing responsibility for the failure of her marriage, and even to pursuing her poker career for the wrong reasons.

This last admission is the most interesting. Because poker is so competitive and because of the type of people who are attracted to pursue careers in it, the culture almost requires that pros play as high as they possibly can. Naturally, this can be a sound economic decision; if you are beating the game, why shouldn’t you play higher? But the profession is so ruthless – think of David Sklansky’s declaration about Eric Drache a couple decades back when he ranked Drache as the seventh best Stud player in the world but noted that Eric’s problem was that he played every day against nos. 1-6 – that a poker player can get very close to the top of the pyramid and still be broke and feel inadequate.

For Annie Duke, periodically subject to panic attacks, feelings of inadequacy, and an impulse to make decisions that prevent her from making other (more important) decisions, the biggest cash games were dangerous territory, and not just financially. She once won $300,000 in a week of high-stakes Pot Limit Omaha. A week later, it was gone. Why, she finally asked herself, was she playing so high? When she was beating the games in Billings, Montana, and finishing in the money at a few World Series events, she was doing all she needed to provide for her family financially.

She actually credits her “online tormentor” – who she is polite enough not to name but is easy to identify – for helping her recognize this. The personal attacks (to which she has never publicly responded, so it’s not really fair to refer to the situation as a “feud”) forced her to examine why she was playing poker, and why she wanted to play in the biggest games. She ultimately concluded that part of it was because she wanted the validation of others’ opinions. But compared with the financial pressure (not to mention what it said about her as a person for having this motivation), her love of poker wasn’t worth pursuing it in this fashion.

Certainly, part of getting off the cash-game escalator required that she admit that she is not better than Chip Reese or Phil Ivey. But there are plenty of other excellent players who aren’t either, and the difference is that they are, right now, losing gigantic sums of money trying to prove otherwise. Annie Duke is comfortable, perhaps for the first time in her life, with who she is: a talented poker player who can do well in big tournaments and occasional cash games, a good mom, and the CEO of “the Annie Duke business,” which includes, in addition to this book, UltimateBet.com, instructional DVDs, computer games, public appearances, and TV and movie deals. That should be enough for any healthy person, which is what Duke strives to be.

Anne of a Thousand Plays
So Annie Duke is not going to give Doyle Brunson or Johnny Chan a shot at the money she won in the Tournament of Champions beyond a few thousand dollars at a time in tournament buy-ins. Does she still have anything to teach about poker?

Duke treats readers to a view of how a professional poker player works, and nearly every poker player who reads the book can learn from it. Forget about the portions of the book that appear to be for “instruction.” The book is not meant to be a conventional strategy guide, and the advice set off from the narrative in boxes is very basic and usually repetitive of the accompanying text.

As Annie Duke takes readersthrough her World Series triumph, however, she describes how she does her job and these portions contain valuable lessons. For instance, you, as the reader, are sitting behind her at the beginning of the Omaha event. The other players are strangers but she explains how she searches for clues. She listens to their speech, notes their nervous habits, even watches them blink.

Sometimes, her explanations of how she develops a strategy are brilliant; other times, they are perfunctory. Rather than analyze her opponents at the Tournament of Champions, she introduces them by telling us what they were wearing that day. But she redeems herself by explaining how, as the tournament proceeded, she developed her strategy (recognizing her opponents’ great skill after the flop, she took away that ability by making her big moves before the flop) as well as how she neutralized Phil Hellmuth’s psychological tactics when they were heads up.

In taking you through the key hands, Duke also demonstrates the kind of moves that the pros are able to execute, even on each other. She describes a key hand in the Omaha tournament in which she senses Todd Brunson was making a move at a pot with a weak hand. With a weak hand herself (she had raised before the flop with a strong low draw that never materialized), she reraises and induces Todd to fold. Far from congratulating herself for outplaying him on the hand, she makes it clear that these kinds of moves must be attempted selectively, don’t always work, and sometimes work only against the best players.

Among the elite players, the layers of thinking run deep. That’s why the pros play rock-paper-scissors for money and Perry Friedman, supposedly the Doyle Brunson of the activity, starts by saying, “I’m going with rock.” His opponent now has to decide if he is telling the truth. Friedman, in turn, believes he can outthink opponents when it comes to what they will do with that statement. Interestingly, when sixty-four poker pros played this game for ESPN during the World Series, Annie made it to the final four by using the serial numbers on a dollar bill to make random decisions.

If you are building a poker library, Annie Duke is recommended reading for some of the same reasons as Barry Greenstein’s Ace on the River. Although Greenstein’s and Duke’s books are drastically different treatments of how a professional gambler thinks, how their minds work – indeed, just that their minds are always working – is something all players can benefit from understanding. Some of the things that Duke and Greenstein do are beyond us, either because to their natural ability or thousands of hours at the table. But, for other things, we can try.

Maybe we will never be as good as Barry Greenstein at maximizing our profits in a session where we start out winning big, or as good as Annie Duke at picking up tells on our opponents. They are playing chess and we are playing checkers, but at least we’re playing checkers! If we don’t even consider these things, we’re just buying lottery tickets.

The science of poker is contained in books by authors like Sklansky, Malmuth, Harrington, and Brunson. It is a rare player who can advance without mastering those fundamentals, plus putting in a lot of time at the tables. But the art of poker is contained elsewhere, and Annie Duke’s book – in the midst of the flirting and the cursing and the vomiting and the busting her brother of out three World Series events and the Tournament of Champions – is one of those places.