Poker News

Annie Duke

A Three-Part Series on Poker, Politics, and People Annie Duke is a woman of strong and wide-ranging opinions on a wide variety of subjects, and one of the best all-around poker players in the world. She’s also been very active in the fight to overturn the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and even testified before Congress last month. She’s a hard woman to catch up with and even harder to keep up with. But that didn’t faze our intrepid reporter Jennifer Matiran, who managed to corral Annie Duke long enough to gather enough material for this three-part interview on poker, politics, and more.

The first part of Jennifer’s chat with Annie follows, with the remainder of her interview continuing in the next two issues.

JENNIFER: Has celebrity changed you? ANNIE DUKE: Me? No, the things that changed me are growing up, having four kids and understanding what’s important in life. I am very different than I was in my 20s, when I first started playing. I am more mature, and more forgiving of other people’s faults. I was a tough cookie back then; I am much softer human being now. If I had met myself now versus then, I like myself a lot better now.

JM: So what advice would you give to somebody who wants to go pro?

AD: First, get an education so you have something else to do. To make a good living you actually have to play quite high. So the amount of money you make is based on the amount of money that you play. If you are playing $3-$6 poker you are earning about $6 to $12 per hour.

People have stars in their eyes; they think that poker players are rich. But they should have something to fall back on.

I liken poker to acting. Acting looks easy. You say some lines and are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. How hard could it be? Hundreds of thousands of people pour into LA every year trying become actors and less than 5 percent of them actually make a living at it.

While it looks very easy, it is actually quite hard. Same with poker. It takes a lot of time, a lot of experience, and you have to be very dedicated. Just like acting, you have to have the right personality for it.

One of the things that they say about actors is that you have to be very good at taking rejection. And it’s the same for poker; you have to be very good at losing because you do a lot of it on the way to winning. It’s also critically important to make sure you put the work in and take advantage of the information that is out there.

When I started out there wasn’t much information available about how to play poker. There wasn’t poker on TV. There weren’t the books or the boot camps. I was very luckyto have my brother, and my brother had a group of games players in New York. It was like passing down lore.

Then there is money management. You can be an extremely talented poker player, maybe even the best poker player in the world, but if you don’t have the money management skills you won’t survive. You can’t be a good poker player if you are broke. Playing poker isn’t just about playing the game; it’s about your overall results when you are supposed to be making a living at it.

The other way that people go wrong is playing above their means by betting too much and risking too much of their bankroll. It is extremely common that really good players are broke.

JM: What are your views on bluffing?

AD: Intermediate players bluff too much. In the beginning players think only about their own hands. They know when their own hand is good and when to play. By the time that they become intermediate players, they think, “Oh, wait a minute; it’s not just about what I have. It’s also about what the other players’ hands are, as well as how they are going to react to my bet.”

Realizing that poker is really a theoretical game, you discover that you can win without the best hand. That is a very exciting discovery for most people. And what happens to intermediate players is that they put too much emphasis on that discovery by equating poker to out-playing your opponent by bluffing them.

It’s true that playing poker is a matter of outplaying your opponents.

But what that means is making better decisions then they do-like figuring out how to extract the most money from a hand. Out-playing your opponent is more about coming up with the optimum strategy, and that they have a whole toolbox of techniques, not just bluffing.

More on this multi-part interview with Annie Duke next issue, when Annie and I chat about poker’s teen aged sensation, Annette Obrestad.

Photo by Flipchip / LasVegasVegas.com

Filed under: Poker News