Annie Duke - Poker's Leading Lady

How did you get started in poker?

I was going to graduate school and I quit because I decided that I didn't want to do that. So, I moved to Montana with my ex-husband and we lived in this crappy house that cost $125 a month and we couldn't afford the mortgage. There were poker games forty minutes away in Billings so I called my brother up and asked him for advice on what to do because I didn't have any money. He suggested I play poker and sent me $2400 to get started in a 10/20 game and I won $2800 my first month, so that was the last time I ever did anything else for a living.

What do you think about the Asian influence on poker?

Definitely the Asian culture is very much accepting of gambling, much more than the American culture. I think partly because of that there are a lot of great Asian players that have come out, Johnny Chan, obviously, Scotty Nguyen is a World Champion who is great. Obviously Men "The Master" has a billion bracelets, Tuan Le now is great. John Phan, David Pham, Young Phan. There are so many great Asian players and definitely they are great for the game. You have these amazing stories about Scotty Nguyen who was on a boat and came over here and obviously found a lot of success, and the things that Men does. He takes so much of his money and he is building schools and doing charity work over in Vietnam. He is definitely staying true to his culture and where he came from. There are more great Asian players than the percentage playing. It shows something about their talent for understanding gaming, which I think is somewhat cultural because it's that whole idea of luck, and gambling is more built into the culture.

General advice for a beginner poker player?

My main piece of advice is this, when I started playing I had my brother teaching me which is obviously an extremely unique situation to be in, to have someone that caliber teaching me poker, very unusual. The only thing you could read back then that was available as far as quality poker books was Sklansky's stuff, which was mainly on limit poker and then Super System which had one little chapter on no limit and that was it. There certainly weren't DVD's and poker videos and books written by Dan Harrington. I have my DVD's out now, and my brother has his which are great. The thing that I would say to new players is you are in a unique situation this day in age that there is incredible source material from incredible players who are at the top of their game. We aren't even talking about retired people writing books, these people are giving you their secrets today that they use today, to win and you should take advantage of every single piece of information out there and go into it understanding that a strategy that might work for Doyle isn't necessarily going to work for you, so you want to try different pieces of advice that the great players are giving you to see what works with your personality and your own personal style.

So then you can make it work for you?

Even if Doyle's style and Doyle's advice doesn't really work for you, you need to understand what he's doing, because you are going to play against the guy that it does work for. Get your hands on every piece of educational material out there and really study the game. Another unique opportunity that you have that I didn't have when I was growing up as a poker player is that I was learning at 10/20. that was the only choice because they have to pay their dealers and they have to pay for the table time and they have to pay their rent, so they cant spread a .5/.10 game, or a .50/1 game. The smallest you will ever find at a casino is 1/2 game and that's really rare. Usually you are looking at 2/3 as your lowest limits, but now you can play really small limits online. You should go and do that because you can take these strategies and get such cheap experience. For $5 you can try these strategies out where I had to pay $200 to get. It's this whole new world where there's this wealth of information and there's this incredible way through internet poker to play inexpensively and to learn your lessons cheap which is completely amazing. That's really my main advice to anybody starting out today. Understand that I didn't have that and you guys are so lucky that's how the world is today.