By
Dan |
Published
Sep 06 2006, 12:54 PM
In a male dominated industry such as poker, one woman stands out from the crowd: Annie Duke. Sister of poker professional Howard Lederer, Duke won her first World Series of Poker bracelet in the $2,000 Omaha Hi/Lo Split event in 2004. Later that year, she would go on to defeat a field which included poker greats Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, and Phil Hellmuth, Jr., at the WSOP Tournament of Champions, taking home $2 million. The Team UltimateBet member is truly one of poker’s greatest ambassadors and recently appeared on the PocketFives.com Podcast (www.pocketfives.com/podcast) to speak on her love of Omaha, the World Poker Tour lawsuit, online poker, and her adoration for PocketFives.com.
Duke’s bracelet in the Omaha event is indicative of her insight into the game. She is not exclusively a Texas Hold’em player: “What makes Omaha 8/b advantageous for a great player is the fact that people are trained on single winner games [like Texas Hold’em]. When you move to a game with two winners, players don’t understand the mathematical implications.” Amateurs often overplay weak hands in Omaha, partly because they do not know how to bet in relation to their hand: “In poker, no hand has value except in relation to the board and other players’ hands.”
She is also involved in an ongoing lawsuit with the World Poker Tour over releases that jeopardize a player’s rights to their own image: “The issues in the WPT release affect every poker player. If you go into a poker tournament expecting to win, then your name has value if you win it. If someone has taken away the ability to leverage your name, then you are giving up rights that are extremely valuable. You should have control over your own name.” Duke speaks further on the WPT lawsuit on the PocketFives.com Podcast.
A veteran of several WPT events, Duke also takes issue with blind structures in televised final tables: “What the WPT has done to the blind structures is criminal. In the WPT Championship event, there are 90 minute blind levels with very smooth escalation. When you get to the final table of the Championship event, they roll the blinds back to an hour long. When you get heads up, they roll it back to a half hour long and the levels also double in value because they have a television schedule to follow. They are basically altering what makes a poker tournament skillful in order to make sure they don’t have to pay their television workers overtime.”
As a member of Team UB, Duke is exposed to all things online poker. She is able to experience the quality of both online poker players and “brick and mortar” casino players: “There are tons of players in their 20’s who would have never been as good as they are now has it not been for online poker because of the volume of hands and tournaments you can play. Now, you can become an extremely good [online poker] player at an extremely young age and have a much longer life of being a favorite. I’ve been extremely impressed with the young players coming out of online poker.” Other members of Team UB include Hellmuth and Antonio Esfandiari, as well as several online poker professionals.
Annie Duke is a registered member of PocketFives.com, which is dedicated to providing a community and news outlet for online poker: “PocketFives.com is the only forum I post on. It’s really about poker and people who want to know about poker. I really enjoy it. I really believe in online poker as its own, totally legitimate form of poker. There are great poker players being brought out of that arena.” Duke’s Podcast is currently available at www.pocketfives.com/podcast.