Annie Duke

Anne LaBarr Duke (née Lederer; born September 13, 1965) is an American former professional poker player and author in cognitive-behavioral decision science and decision education.

Following her move to Las Vegas, Duke continued successfully playing poker on a professional basis through the late 1990s, and by 2000 had 16 in the money finishes at WSOP events, prior to the WSOP World Championship event that year.

In 1991, one month before defending her doctoral dissertation, she decided that she no longer wished to pursue academia and left school.

In 1992, she married Ben Duke, grandson of Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke and a descendent of Washington Duke, and moved to Billings, Montana.

The couple divided their time between Las Vegas and Montana between 1992 and 2002, when they moved to Portland, Oregon.

In 1992 after Duke moved to Billings her brother encouraged her to play poker professionally, sending her $2,400 and providing her with poker instruction books and lessons by phone.

She began to play poker initially at the Crystal Lounge, a local bar in Billings that had a legal poker room.

Following a successful year playing in Montana, her brother prompted her to enter tournaments at the 1994 World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas.

Within the first month, she won $70,000 and decided to move to Las Vegas to pursue a professional poker career.

In the first two tournaments of the 1994 World Series of Poker, Duke placed 14th and 5th, and finished 26th in the Main Event.

Maud Duke was born in 1995; Leo Duke, in 1998; Lucy Duke, in 2000; and Nell Duke, in 2002.

From 2000 onward, she became well known for her high-profile achievements in WSOP events.

In the 2000 WSOP World Championship event, although nine months pregnant with her third child, she placed 10th out of a total of 512 players, which was the second-highest finish by a woman in the event's history.

She holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet from 2004 and used to be the leading money winner among women in WSOP history, and is still in the top five as of April 2023, despite being retired from poker, last cashing at a tournament 2010.

Duke won the 2004 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the National Heads-Up Poker Championship in 2010.

They were married until 2004 and had four children.

She received a WSOP gold bracelet in 2004, placing first out of 234 entrants in an Omaha Hi-Lo Split tournament.

By July of that year she had become the top female money winner in the history of the WSOP; earning over $650,000 from 25 in the money finishes, including 13 at the final table.

Later in 2004, she placed first in the inaugural WSOP Tournament of Champions, beating her brother and nine former world championship winners and winning $2 million.

She has written a number of instructional books for poker players, including Decide to Play Great Poker and The Middle Zone, and she published her autobiography, How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker, in 2005.

Duke also authored two books on decision-making, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, and How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices.

In 2005, Duke and her children relocated to Hollywood Hills, California.

More than 30 years after leaving graduate school, she returned to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2022, earning her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in June 2023.

Duke first played Texas hold'em at age 22 in a casino and continued to play for fun in Las Vegas casinos while visiting her brother, Howard Lederer, during her graduate school years.

In the 2006 WSOP, she was one of only two women left in the tournament when she finished in 88th place with $51,129 in winnings.

Duke co-founded the non-profit Ante Up for Africa with actor Don Cheadle in 2007 to benefit charities working in African nations, and has raised money for other charities and non-profits through playing in and hosting charitable poker tournaments.

She has been involved in advocacy on a number of poker-related issues including advocating for the legality of online gambling and for players' rights to control their own image.

In 2010, Duke won the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship; she outlasted a field of 64 players, including eliminating previous winner Huck Seed, and defeating Erik Seidel in the final match.

Duke was co-founder, executive vice president, and commissioner of the Epic Poker League from 2011 to 2012.

Duke, born as Anne LaBarr Lederer, grew up in Concord, New Hampshire, where her father, writer and linguist Richard Lederer, taught English literature at St. Paul's School and her mother, Rhoda S. Lederer, daughter of trial attorney Craig Spangenberg, taught at Concord High School.

Her parents were both card players and Duke became interested in cards from an early age.

Her siblings are professional poker player Howard Lederer and author/poet Katy Lederer, who published a memoir about the Lederer family.

Her father is Jewish, while her mother was a gentile.

Duke was not raised Jewish.

Duke attended St. Paul's School, While still attending St. Paul's, Annie worked her first job at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She enrolled at Columbia University, joining the first co-ed class in its 230-year history, and pursued a double major in English and psychology.

After graduating from Columbia, she pursued a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on cognitive linguistics and writing her dissertation on a hypothesis of how children learn their first language called "syntactic bootstrapping".

For her graduate studies she was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship.

She won $500,000 and became the first and only female winner of the event, which ended in 2013.

In a 2020 interview, Duke described herself as retired from poker, stating she had not played since 2012.