Annie Duke

Annie Duke is one of the best poker players in the world, as well as a famous author. She was born in New Hampshire in 1965 with a brother that was a pro poker player. Annie was also affected by her father who was a writer, another career that she would have a future in one day.

Duke majored in psychology and the English language, which made her deserving of the award NSF Fellowship. This took her to the Pennsylvania University where she met Ben Duke who was soon to become her husband. When she was just one month from getting her psychology degree, she left school to train professional poker with her elder brother.

Before really getting started with the poker, however, she had a regular career within IT for a few years. She worked at a company that developed game software for online casinos.

In not too long she decided to divorce her husband and move to Los Angeles with her kids. At that point her poker play had become really decent, but it wasn’t until it was more brilliant than decent that she moved to Las Vegas where she did nothing but playing pro poker. Thanks to her brother Howard, who had taught her well, she kept winning the big bucks. By this time she also remarried.

Annie has something of a star aura around her, since she was the one who trained celebrity actor Ben Affleck before he won the California State Poker Championship. But she didn’t do too bad herself, when she finished 10^th place in the WSOP. In the year of 2004 she had become so good at poker that she defeated her teacher – in other words, her brother – in 4 different events. At about the same time she won a gold bracelet, which is a big victory for a poker player. Two other ladies that share a similar story and fame as her are Cyndy Violette and Kathy Liebert. The three of them all participated in the open WSOP event.

Annie still has had the most first finishes in the WSOP history of all poker players there are. In 2004 she won the World Series of Poker tournament which gave her a nice little sum of 2 000 000 dollars. When she received them, it was the highest sum that a female poker player had won. Today, however, youngster Annette Obrestad holds that record. Annette had previously mostly been playing online poker, which (apart from experience) had earned her thousands and thousands of dollars in winnings and rakeback.

But Annie Duke still is one of the world’s best poker players, and we will see much more of her in the future.