Annie Duke was born on 13th September, 1965 in the capital city of New Hampshire, Concord. She is a WSOP Golden Bracelet winner and has over $2m in live tournament winnings to date. She has earned a lot of credit for not only being a very versatile professional poker player but transferring her playing ability into other roles that are based around the game but away from the table.
She began playing poker after leaving her academic lifestyle. She carved her teeth at the card rooms in Billings, Montana. Annie Duke’s brother, Howard Lederer, is largely credited with coaching her as well as guiding her in her early years of playing. It wasn’t until 1994 that she moved to Las Vegas and started to play professionally.
She gained a reputation in the year 2000 when she finished 10th in the WSOP despite being 8 months pregnant. It wasn’t long before her profile as a professional poker player spread into other disciplines. 2004 saw her tutor Ben Affleck before he entered into, and won, the 2004 California State Poker Championship. In 2005 she wrote the highly successful book Annie Duke: How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker. She had worked for UltimateBet since 2002 but her departure at the end of 2010 led her onto a different calling. She has been asked to lead the way with a new professional poker league being set up by a partnership between Federated Sports and Gaming and the Palms Casino Resort.
Duke is considered to be a superb writer. She wrote for UltimateBet’s website and produced a number of popular articles on Omaha HiLo. She is also a very active and popular twitter user, with over 6,000 tweets, more than 26,000 followers and tweets that make waves everywhere in the poker world.
But Annie Duke is not clean of controversy. She divorced her long time husband Ben Duke in 2004, in what many consider was a result of her poker career. 2010 saw a Daniel Negreanu Annie Duke fight over Annie’s position about the women event in the WSOP. Negreanu thought that the player, who prouds herself for being the best female poker player in the world shouldn’t had spoken against the women event. The Annie Duke Daniel Negreanu Feud made waves in the world of poker, especially with Negreanu being the leading spokesman for PokerStars.
Her versatility on many areas certainly does not make her a jack of all trades. Her primary love and success is playing poker. Her success at the WSOP makes her not only arguably the finest female poker player around but it also makes her one of the most renowned players of the modern era. Her 38 cashes at the WSOP show how prolific she is. Four further money finishes on the WPT only add to this reputation. It is a ruthless tenacity that is echoed in her business dealings outside of playing poker.
The latest venture of hers, which many see as the biggest venture since the WSOP and WPT were introduced would only enhance Duke’s image further. She has shown she is a more than capable poker player but she has also proven she can deliver quality in the roles of a coach, a writer and a business woman. The future seems bright for Annie Duke and she is certainly a face to keep an eye on.
