Female poker star and celebrity Annie Duke features in Cardplayer.com’s weekly excerpt from Phil Hellmuth’s book ‘Deal me in’. The book details the trials and tribulations of 20 poker players.
Sister of ‘Poker Professor’ Howard Lederer, one of the major shareholders in Full Tilt Poker, Duke is a star in her own right. She has amassed $3.6 million in tournament winnings, and has a WSOP Omaha Hi-Lo bracelet to her name. Her stardom stretches beyond the green felt – she is one of Ultimate Bet’s main ambassadors alongside Phil Hellmuth, and finished second in Donald Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice, where she excelled in fund-raising.
In the weekly excerpt, Duke describes her financial difficulties as a graduate student, when she was on $13k a year. She was first captivated by poker when her brother, Howard Lederer, invited her to the Golden Nugget Casino in Vegas. After watching him play, Howard insisted, ‘you’ve watched me play a lot. Don’t worry. You’ll do great’.
Duke set about playing vanilla poker - $1/$3 Limit Hold’em with the aid of a starting hand chart Howard had crafted for her on a napkin. Duke explains how she was permitted to, ‘play A-J or better in unpaired hands and two sixes or better if I had a pair. I took the napkin and headed for the casino’.
Having grown up in a card-playing family, where she partnered her father at bridge when she was 14, Duke took naturally to the game. But she was also, ‘worried about disappointing my brother’, who had learnt his trade at the famous Mayfair Cards Club in New York, alongside Erik Seidel and Dan Harrington.