Born in Concord, New Hampshire, Annie Duke grew up in a family who played card games for entertainment and intellectual combat. In fact, Annie would throw her cards when she lost a card game – not a sign of her future ‘poker face’ necessarily, but certainly the seeds of her competitive nature.
Talk to many professional poker players, and they’ll tell you that they knew from a very early age that they wanted to play professional poker, but not Duke. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, in their first coed class, she majored in English and Psychology, intending to become a professor. During that time, her brother Howard Lederer, a two-time World Series of Poker bracelet holder and two-time World Poker Tour champion, started playing poker in local New York poker rooms. On breaks from her studies, Duke would watch him play, but still didn’t get into the game. Instead, she went to graduate school in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she won a coveted National Science Foundation Fellowship.
During graduate school, Lederer invited her to Las Vegas during the World Series of Poker and taught her the basic rules of poker for Texas hold'em, the world’s most popular poker card game. Trips to Las Vegas planted the poker seed, and in 1992, after five years in graduate school, Duke left academia, moved to Montana with her husband, and started playing poker in earnest in the local poker rooms in Billings, Montana. Her brother sent her $2,400 and gave her some poker lessons. In the spring of 1994, impressed with her poker results, Lederer convinced Duke to play in the World Series. She placed 13th in her first tournament and 3rd in her second. She also placed in the 10K championship event the first year she played --knocking Lederer out of the tournament. Cashing over 70K that first year, Duke moved her family to Las Vegas to pursue poker professionally.
A wise career choice: Considered one of the world’s best poker players, having knocked out Phil Hellmuth and eight other poker legends including four past World Series of Poker champions to take the title and win $2 million in the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions in September 2004. Duke, was only woman to play in the No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em winner-take-all, invitation-only tournament, established by Harrah's Entertainment and ESPN. Deafeating a field of 234 players in this years WSOP $2,000 buy-in Omaha Hi/Lo tournament (winning her first WSOP bracelet) and winning the Bellagio $2500 Limit Hold’em event makes Duke the only woman to ever win two major tournaments in one year. As evidenced by these three wins, each a different game (Omaha 8/b, limit hold’em and no limit hold’em), Duke is an all around skilled player.
Sought after by many for her poker skill and knowledge of the rules of poker, Duke consults with the online poker site, UltimateBet.com, to ensure that their rules of poker and tournament structures are what you’d find if you walked into any poker room along the Vegas strip. Duke provides online poker seminars at UltimateBet.com for their players, and at any given time people playing at UltimateBet.com can find Duke chatting with other players about the rules of poker (and maybe a little gossip on the side). It has certainly been a rewarding poker career for Duke. Along the way she has also enjoyed a very successful family life, raising four children, ages 2 to 9.