Annie Duke
Friday, November 20, 2009 - Annie Duke
There have been so many transitions the last two weeks around here. Obviously, the main transition as far as UB is concerned is the big rebranding. Ultimatebet.com is now UB.com and that is really exciting…mainly because everyone always called Ultimate Bet UB anyway and, honestly, there are fewer ways to mistype it in your browser now! Seriously, that is not for nothing because I am the worst with the typos because I type so fast. There are so many ways to screw up Ultimatebet: Utlimatebet, Ultimeatbet, ultimatebte…you get the piture. How am I going to screw up UB.com? Especially now that Firefox automatically corrects misspellings of “com”!
Anyway, I am really exciting about the rebranding. I think it is such a positive change for UB.
On the not so positive side, I am really sad about Jeffrey Pollack’s departure from the World Series of Poker position. Jeffrey has been Commissioner there since 05 and has really done amazing things with that brand. I don’t think people remember what the WSOP was like before Pollack got a hold of it. Of course, prior to the brand being bought by Harrah’s, the WSOP was being run at Binion’s by the Behnen family who had acquired it from Jack Binion. When Jack ran the WSOP it was amazing in terms of how player friendly it was. I mean, sure, the structures sucked but tournaments were being completed in one day then so they kind of had to. But juice was incredibly low, less than 5% and the main event had ZERO juice. Comps flowed freely as well. If you were playing the events you basically never paid for any food during the whole tournament and that included at the yummy Binion’s steakhouse. Those were the good old days for sure (except that hardly anyone was playing poker tournaments back then lol).
When Becky Behnen took the tournament over from Jack the player friendly days were over. Juice went up and up and up. Comps no longer abounded. I was so upset personally about the direction the WSOP that I didn’t even play in 2002 except for exactly just the main event. It would take an army to keep me away from the WSOP and that year there is apparently an army keeping me away because of the way I thought players were being treated.
Now in walked Harrah’s and right from the start it looked bad. Still no comps, higher juice, no relationship with the players and, here was the worst thing, all of a sudden every tournament at the WSOP was No Limit Hold’em. Every day it the tournament was NLH and in the $1500 buy-in range. It was like Harrah’s knew nothing about poker at all and was taking its lead only from what was on TV. The rich tradition of the WSOP is supposed to be about all of poker, not just the small part of it that is NLH. We were losing the ability to reward Omaha play, split game play, limit play and all the other games that make up the rich world that is poker. For all intents and purposes, the WSOP might as well have been called the World Series of No Limit Hold’em.
Now, at the same time as this was happening at the WSOP, the WPT was also acting as a very poor partner to the players. At the time, the WPT set structures at the final tables to accommodate 6 hour windows (apparently after 6 hours they would have to pay overtime). Setting structures by how long you want to film rather than what is good for the players who paid the entries and the fees is preposterous, of course. What that meant was that you could have a tournament that leading into the final table had smooth 90 minute levels with no doubles ever and at the final table the levels would revert to an hour with the blinds doubling each level. At heads up, the levels went to 30 minutes. That is as player unfriendly as it gets and was directed by the WPT’s attitude that the Poker itself was the star of the show and the players were completely interchangeable. With that attitude there is no reason to treat the players well at all and it showed in the way they treated us.
So enter Jeffrey Pollack. Jeffrey had a completely different idea, a revolutionary idea even . He felt that the WSOP could not succeed without the players. That when folks watched the coverage on ESPN they were there to see the players and their personalities and that could not be disconnected from the poker. He understood that the folks who actually buy-in and pay those entry fees are human beings, poker players even. So he reached out and really created a partnership with the players, most notably by forming the Players Advisory Council, which I was proud to be a member of. The PAC had tremendous say in the schedule and the structures of the tournaments and I think the WSOP now has a schedule that really represents the whole of what poker is with structures that are amazingly player friendly. Jeffrey, with the PAC, really brought the WSOP back from the brink of becoming the World Series of No Limit Hold’em.
Outside of his hand in insuring that the poker at the WSOP was great, he always worked hard to make sure the experience of the players was great, too and that the players who had endorsements could fulfill their obligations and the ones who didn’t could still get a logo deal if they were lucky enough to get to a final or featured table. That, of course, is all good for poker. Jeffrey really has been a generous partner to the players and, in a very real sense, the players’ protector and defender at that brand. So I am sad and a concerned to see him leave the brand. I fear for what the relationship with the players will look like in the future if the people remaining at the WSOP don’t take the lesson from Jeffrey that success at the WSOP must be a partnership with the players.
Here’s hoping the powers that be at the WSOP and Harrah’s have taken note of the legacy of Jeffrey Pollack. His success comes from his bridging the gap with the players. His egacy is that of a great friend to the community and that is an amazing legacy to leave.
Tags: espn, Firefox, harrah's, jeffrey pollack, NLH, Players Advisory Council, Poker Poker Poker, ub, ultimatebet, WPT, WSOP
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Thursday, November 12, 2009 - Annie Duke
I am really excited about some awesome changes in the blind structures at UB. I designed the structures that we have been using for years and I have always been pretty damn proud of them. But even a good thing can become better and last week I ripped back through those bad boys and made some big changes with the help of Roothlus :) The changes are huge. Amazing. Crazy! Okay. I know I am exaggerating but I am really excited about them.
We have added tons of level including the 250/500 level for all tournaments. That is a big change because it means you don’t get that big 50% jump anymore from the 200/400 level to the 300/600 level. That is a big jump that I am so psyched we have reduced to two 25% jumps instead. IN our deepstack tournaments, we had this crazy 5/10 level in there which, when you start with 5K in chips was pretty useless. So we got rid of that but added in a 25/50 level instead. I love that change. Start a little higher so the hands in the first round might actually matter but smooth out the structure later so you aren’t just losing a level.
The change to the deepstack events is part of a new policy that some tournaments will now have different structures than others, depending on buy-in and starting stack. Tournaments which start with more than 3K in chips now have a different structure than those that start lower and any tournament with a $500 buy-in or more has a new structure. In total:
1) For events 3K chips and higher the 5/10 level has been removed but a 25/50 level has been added. In total 7 new levels have been added to the structure
2) In events starting with less than 3K chips, a total of 7 levels have been added
3) In event with a buy-in of $500 or more, the 5/10 level is removed replaced by the 25/50 level. In total 11 levels have been added to those structures
4) The UBOC final has a total of 21 levels added to it
5) All tournaments now have antes introduced at the 100/200 level rather than the 150/300 level
6) The structures for limit tourneys have also been revamped and the antes in stud tourneys have been changed to be in line with other sites.
7) The antes in stud cash games have been revamped as well.
I am really excited about all of these changes. The stud changes in particular really fix a problem that UB had in general that the antes and bring ins were often much too high a percentage of the small bet. Those have now been brought in line with industry standards which is nice because it increases the skill level of the game to know how to adjust to antes.
All in all, the new structures give you, the player, much more bang for your buck. No crazy all-in fests on UB. Every tournament on the site now offers more play for your buy-in. I am pretty proud of the changes
Tags: Adam "Roothlus" Levy, tournaments, ub, UBOC
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Monday, October 26, 2009 - Annie Duke
So I have officially processed my untimely demise in the Aruba Classic. Let me give you a little back story though. In the 7 years that I have played that event, I have made the money ONCE. That is right. One time. Now there is a really good reason for that. I generally go down to Aruba with my kids and the thought of staying inside playing poker for the whole trip when my kids are having a blast horseback riding and tubing and whatnot without me doesn’t really work for me. So I play some pretty bad poker when I am in Aruba generally because I am secretly, well not so secretly, trying to get myself knocked out of the event.
But not this year. This year I resolved that I was actually going to try really hard. Last year I had to leave before the event even started because Celebrity Apprentice conflicted with the main event down there. So I headed down to Aruba for exactly three days and then left in a shroud of mystery. I had signed a confidentiality agreement so I couldn’t tell anyone why I was leaving which made for some pretty interesting rumors. I did have to assure a few people that nothing was wrong with my family and there was no emergency while still being coy about why I left. Anyway, we all know how Celebrity Apprentice turned out. I am still trying to decide if it was worth it to leave paradise abruptly for 5 weeks of being called worse than Hitler by Joan Rivers.
Anyway, after having to leave last year I realized that I really missed the opportunity to play and so this year came in with great resolve to play my heart out. I showed up relatively on time and proceeded to get dealt the best cards of my life. In the first two levels I got AA 7 times, KK twice and QQ twice. I am not kidding. I really got dealt those starting hands. So of course I ended the two levels with 4K of the 15K starting chips. As expected really. I was either going to have all the chips on the planet or 4K. When I came back for level three I managed to flop top two with AJ suited vs 99 on an AJ9 board. Oops. That sent me to the rail.
So I managed to hit the parlay: I wasted another year of the Aruba Classic getting knocked out on Day 1 when I was actually really trying (proof of the trying part: I managed to still have 4K in chips after getting all those hands cracked) and I wasted the best run of cards I will ever have. Sheesh.
Now, once I got knocked out I decided to make the best of it and took the opportunity to go tubing with Joe. We got on one of those two man tubes and were having a complete blast because we had a driver who was really trying to create huge wakes to buck us off the tube. Anyone who has gotten thrown off a tube knows that it usually the best part of tubing. Joe and I were really hanging on, though, so the driver was creating bigger and bigger wakes to drag us over until finally he made a wake so big that there was no holding on the tube to stay on because the tube itself was flipping over.
So Joe is on my right and the tube is flipping right so Joe kind of turned over and was heading face down into the ocean below me as I was flipping over him when his heel snapped up on the way into the water and caught me right in the neck. That snapped my head back pretty bad and smashed my lower jaw into my upper jaw in a way that really sent shockwaves up the left side of my face. That was aside from the pain I was experiencing from having just been kicked really hard in the neck. So now I land in the ocean and I am just sobbing in there and Joe isn’t sure right away whether or not I am laughing or crying so he is laughing at first. Then he realizes I am actually in hysterics and helps drag me back onto the tube so the driver can take us in really slowly back to the dock. I say really slowly because every bit of turbulence we hit sent waves of pain through my skull. By that night the inside of my throat had really swelled up which took about two days to go down before it was comfortable to swallow again.
So I got kicked in the head by the cards in the tournament then kicked in the head by Joe in a freak tubing accident. Come to think of it, getting called worse than Hitler for 5 weeks doesn’t sound so bad after all.
Tags: aruba classic, Celebrity Apprentice, Joan Rivers, Poker Poker Poker
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Monday, October 5, 2009 - Annie Duke
A couple of weekends ago I taught a cash game WSOP Academy at the Bicycle Club in LA. During the academies, students get a combination of seminars and hand labs. The seminars are lectures that include some video hand examples. The hand labs give the students a chance to actually play poker in front of the instructors so that the hands they play can get deconstructed. At the end of each hand, the students turn their cards over and the instructors then talk about the good things they did and the mistakes they made. During one of the hand labs at the Bike, I got to experience one of those wonderful moments as a teacher when a student has that Aha! moment.
I was explaining a mistake a student had made. The person in cutoff had raised to 150 (blinds were 25/50). The player in the small blind had then made it 600 and the player in the big blind then made it 1275. The cut off then folded. The small blind now went into the tank for quite a while. While she was in the tank, I was thinking, “I really hope she doesn’t fold since the player in the big blind only min-raised.” At which point, she folded. The small blind now showed AJ and the big blind showed AK. Good fold right? Nope!
Obviously, I first explained what was wrong with the AK only making it 1275. The problem is that really any two cards that reraised in the first place should be calling that bet because of pricing issues so the raise doesn’t really accomplish much. It doesn’t serve to further define the hand of the original raiser and shouldn’t trigger a fold. Now, of course, in this case it did trigger a fold and that was bizarre which is what the discussion was about. I explained that the player holding AJ had to call 675 to win 2025 giving her 3 to 1. And that is why the fold was so bad.
At 3 to 1, if the player in the big blind had turned KK face up, the call would still be mathematically correct since AJ is better than 3 to 1 against KK. Against a hand like TT, the fold is a complete disaster because AJ is even money against that hand getting 3 to 1 from the pot. Even against AK, AJ is about a 3 to 1 dog so the call would be break even against that hand. The problem is that against the kinds of hands that the big blind could be playing, it is true that AJ rates to be the worst hand but it is also true that it doesn’t matter because there was enough money in the pot for the amount of the call to make it mathematically worthwhile to put the 675 in the pot.
I could see that the table was having a lot of trouble with the concept. I was having difficulty getting them to understand that it is okay to call even when you are 100% sure you have the worst hand if there is enough money in the pot to justify it. If you are going to win a hand 1 out of every three times but the pot is paying you as if you will only win 1 out of 4 times then you will make money on the call. Simple as that. But the students definitely were not getting it.
Then I had a thought. I realized I could show them that they all call on a regular basis when they know they don’t have the best hand. I pulled out the QJh and said, “What if that were your hand?” Then I pulled a board of Ah8h2s. I asked them how many of them would call a bet in this spot. They all said they would. Then I asked how many of them thought they had the best hand right now. Then the light bulbs started going on. They started getting it. Obviously, no one thought they had the best hand with the QJh on that board but they all would call because they figure they would make a flush enough of the time to make the call profitable. Their opponent could show them AK there and they would still all call. Somehow the flush draw makes it an obvious call even though you definitely don’t have the best hand right then.
But flush draws aren’t the only drawing hands. In fact, all hands are drawing at something. In the case of AJ vs AK, you are drawing at a J (or KQT). AJ vs KK is drawing for an A. Now if you are drawing for a flush there are more cards in the deck that help but it is no different in the sense that either way you are drawing. It is just about how many cards you are drawing for. The more cards you are drawing for, the more liberally you can call. The fewer cards you are drawing for the better your pot odds need to be.
Seeing the students’ faces light up as they got it was really cool. In fact, it is why I teach.
Tags: Bicycle Club, Poker Poker Poker, WSOP Academy
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Sunday, September 20, 2009 - Annie Duke
I am so excited for this weekend. I do about 7 or so WSOP Academies per year (some with UB’s own P0ker H0, Shawn Rice and Matt Graham and even Mr. Hellmuth will sometimes make an appearance). But whenever I can do one in my hometown it is pretty special. Special mainly because it means I don’t have to fly to Vegas and stay in a hotel and be away from my house. When you travel as much as I do believe me that is a special treat. Any extra time I get to sleep in my own bed is pretty special to me.
This weekend I will be at The Bicycle Club teaching my first ever cash game academy. The WSOP Academy has done a few cash game academies but never one where I am the instructor so I am really excited to branch out from the normal tournament play instruction I do. Joining me at this camp will be Ali Nejad and Shawn Rice so it should be really fun since both of those guys are really great. I spent this afternoon watching video clips from High Stakes Poker to analyze during the academy. Those are a really great learning tool since showing concepts in action is about the best way to really reinforce points.
It is also really valuable to show students that the top pros sometimes screw up :) I know I screw up all the time and I think players often make too many decisions based on fear of making a mistake. That kind of decision making process always leads to more mistakes rather than fewer since your decisions are driven by fear of screwing up rather than finding the actually correct line of play in a hand. Fear of failure rarely creates good decisions or successful outcomes so seeing that even the top players in the world make mistakes I think is a really good lesson to learn. I think it frees people up to realize that screwing up is okay as long as you see the screw up as an opportunity to learn. I know when I screw up I use it as a way to improve my game and I rarely get upset about it. This kind of attitude where you see opportunity in your mistakes also really helps stop tilt.
The video analysis is a new piece of the camp for me and I am really looking forward to analyzing the hands for the students. I am also going to be doing a full on pot odds section which I will no doubt really enjoy since unlocking the magic of math is always fun for me. Considering the tweet I got the other day, others may not feel the same though:
DivePoker@RealAnnieDuke looking forward to the impossible math this weekend…apparently the WSOP accademy is 100x harder when you’re around lol!
I, of course, consider that tweet a compliment 
Tags: high stakes poker, Matt Graham, P0ker H0, Phil Hellmuth, Poker Poker Poker, ShawnRice, ub, Vegas, WSOP Academy
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Sunday, September 13, 2009 - Annie Duke
So this weekend I was supposed to be going to the Sports Legends Challenge down in the Bahamas. Believe it or not, I was not particularly excited to go (except that I was going to get to see Herschel Walker down there). October 3rd is the start of Aruba so I really wasn’t too stoked about heading all the way to Bahamas from LA and then two weeks later doing the exact same thing basically, heading all the way from LA to Aruba and back. That is a lot of travel and, let’s face it, Aruba just totally kicks ass so that is really the trip I look forward to every year anyway. It is not like anything in the Bahamas could top it. So I really felt like while I would probably have a blast once I got down there I was just, you know, dreading the trip. I mean dreading the travel. Plus, it meant I would be taking the ten hour plane trip on my birthday. Ugh. Not the best way to spend it I would venture to say.
Well, someone was smiling on me because the Sports Legends Challenge got postponed! Yes! My weekend was freed up! And my birthday didn’t have to be a travel day anymore. I immediately started making other plans and the plan I came up with was to take Joe to Memphis. That might sound like a weird choice but I gave Joe a trip to Memphis for his 40th birthday. He really wanted to see Memphis plus he loves BBQ. I mean that boy really loves BBQ. And Memphis is the town to visit if you love that stuff. So because I love Joe I said I would take him to Memphis to eat as much BBQ he could in the space of 3 days and we could see Graceland while we were there.
But here is the problem, I gave him this trip for his 40th birthday, right? But he is 41! I mean what kind of crappy girlfriend am I that I gave him this trip a year and a half ago and am just now getting around to actually taking him? Granted, we were going to go last fall but The Celebrity Apprentice got in the way of that but seriously, I suck. So as soon as SLC got cancelled I was like we are going to Memphis!
So armed with a list of the top ten barbeque places in Memphis (http://www.fabhotdogs.com/FD_FoodMenu1.html) we are heading out on Saturday. Sunday is my birthday so I think we are going to hit Graceland that day and do a nice restaurant that night but, honestly, the best birthday present for me right now is not feeling like an asshole for not getting around to his big 40th birthday gift. Monkey off back now
Tags: Aruba, bahamas, Celebrity Apprentice, Graceland, Sports Legends Challenge
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Sunday, September 6, 2009 - Annie Duke
Last week I was in Chicago to teach a WSOP Academy in Hammond, Indiana right across the border. I generally make it a rule that I don’t teach camps outside of California or Vegas because I don’t like traveling away from my kids but I made an exception for this because I really like Chicago and thought it might be a nice weekend getaway for me and Joe. Now, I don’t think many people know that I am a huge cooking show fanatic. My two favorite cooking shows are Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and Top Chef. I am pretty sure that Joe is completely jealous of Guy Fieri’s job which is just doing around to dives around the country and trying the food. We both watch that show together and, in fact, are planning a trip to Memphis in the next couple of weeks which is built just on BBQ places we have seen on Triple D (as Guy Fieri calls his show).
As for Top Chef, I just finished watching Top Chef Masters which was a version of Top Chef where the best chefs in the country were competing for charity. Like a celebrity chef version of the show. So two of the finalists have restaurants in Chicago, Art Smith who has Table 52 and Rick Bayless who has Frontera Grill. Bayless won the whole competition and his food look incredible. He does authentic Mexican and man I really wanted to try it. But, alas, as hard as we tried and as many strings as we pulled we could not get a reservation. I was so sad. We did manage a reservation at Table 52 and what was hilarious is that two of the other couples sitting next to us in the restaurant were there because they has seen Top Chef Masters, too! I thought that was pretty funny.
People in Chicago are much friendlier than in LA and the people sitting near us were striking up conversations with us which was a really nice change. I particularly enjoyed the older couple who were fascinated that Joe ordered every side dish on the menu. That’s right. Every single one! Corn pudding, fries, candied yams, mac and cheese and greens. He figured we were probably never coming back so he wanted to try everything. In case you are wondering, his order from best to worst was greens, corn pudding, mac and cheese, yams and fries. The sides were awesome but Joe’s favorite was the ridiculous desserts, particularly the root beer float which was actually a sandwich made from homemade sugar cookies with homemade root beer ice cream in between them.
I wish we had time to go to some of the Diners in the Chicago area that are on Guy Fieri’s show. That will have to wait till next trip. BTW, the camp went great. But I gained like 5 pounds!D
Tags: Annie Duke, Chicago, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, Food, Guy Fieri, Top Chef, WSOP Academy
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Monday, August 24, 2009 - Annie Duke
I headed off on Wednesday of last week to go to Adventures of the Mind, an amazing mentoring summit. The program brings together 150 of the smartest high school students in the country with mentors who have gotten to the top of their respective fields. The summit was held at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. I found myself in a room with 9 Nobel prize winners, the founder of Twitter, the head of Mozilla and John Nash (just to name a few of the mentors). I was honored to be in the same room with such great minds including 9 Nobel Prize Winners. Even cooler for me was that IAS was the place where John von Neumann was a professor. I speak of von Neumann several times a year in my poker seminars as he was the father of Game Theory. Any poker player should revere von Neumann and I got to walk the very paths that von Neumann walked. Oh, and Einstein walked those same paths too. He was appointed to the IAS in 1933 at a salary of $15,000 a year which was a buttload of money back then. Freaking amazing experience for me.
Anyway, getting to Adventures of the Mind was pretty harrowing (as was getting home). I planned to take an 11:30 pm flight on Continental out of LAX. I got there and the flight was delayed an hour which turned into 2 hours because flights before mine were already stacked up late. When we finally got on the plane it was already 1:30 in the morning and I was exhausted so as we starting taxiing to the runway I fell asleep. Pretty quickly I was woken up by an announcement that we were taxiing to the gate. At first I thought that I had gone out hard and clearly slept through the whole flight. To my dismay, though, I realized we hadn’t even taken off yet when the rest of the announcement said we had to go back to remove a woman from the plane. That would be a DRUNK woman from the plane who had gotten up and walked to the bathroom during takeoff to throw up! I am not kidding here.
So I was up front in business class so I got to eavesdrop on everything that was going on. We got back to the gate and the maintenance people had already gone home so we had to sit there for a over 15 minutes while they found a maintenance person to open the door of the plane. The whole time this drunk lady and her friend were complaining about how they didn’t understand why they had to be removed from the plane. Didn’t the flight attendant think they had already been embarrassed enough? The answer to that was, “No!” No one told them that they could get up and walk around the plane during taxi and takeoff! Okay…aside from the fact that the flight attendants made their normal safety announcements as we were leaving the gate and I would have to ask, “What the hell planet do you women live on? Everyone knows you can’t get out of your seat during taxi and take off.” Oh, and the final complaint of these women was, “Don’t you know you are ruining our weekend?” The answer to that was, “It’s Wednesday.” I thought that was pretty funny. My own personal answer was that they were doing a pretty good job of ruining my day.
So they finally remove these women from the plane. As a side note the one who threw up claimed to have only had two glasses of wine. I’ll take the over on that one. Anyway, they find the maintenance people who now have to clean the bathroom this woman has thrown up in. Apparently, she didn’t throw up in the toilet but in the sick. Now I am sure everyone has seen a plane’s bathroom sink and it is tiny so the whole thing was clogged with some nasty, chunky throw up. I felt pretty bad for the maintenance worker with that one. It took her about 15 minutes to clean that gross puke up. Ew!
Okay, so finally around 2 am we head toward the runway again and I arrive in Princeton almost three hours late. Thanks drunk lady! You made my day!
So I spent the next two days at The Institute for Advanced Study. I listened to some amazing spoken word artists, heard the story of how Captchas, those distorted words you have to type on the internet to prove you are a human, are now being used to digitize books. Check out http://www.recaptcha.net to find out about that. And Luis von Ahn who is the brains behind that operation (and an amazing speaker I might add). I got to hear from the president of Rhode Island School of Design, here the founder of Pixar speak and also hear from the inventor of the Ultima series of games. And that was just a sampling of the great minds I had access too. It was incredible to see these high school students enrapt by the speakers. Knowing that I was a part of an experience that will stay with these high school students their whole lives and have such a deep impact on them (it definitely had a deep impact on me).
My talk to the students was about how I found my way into poker which was really just a message about understanding that just because you are really good at something does not mean that it is what you are meant to be doing because no matter how good you are if it doesn’t light you up inside it is not the path you are meant to take, no matter how many mentors have invested time in that path or the obligations you feel towards them. In my case, I was very good at the academic path I had chosen as a young woman. I had gone to an Ivy League college, and Ivy League grad school. I had secured a very prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowship to go to grad school. My mentors and advisors had put a tremendous amount of time and effort into me and my education. And, frankly, I was a very good scientist.
But when it came down to it the only thing that was keeping down that path was a fear of failing my mentors and my parents. Had I not had the guts to leave I would never have gone down the poker path, a path that I have true passion for. A path that lights me up inside. And had I not had the guts to leave, I might never have founded Ante Up for Africa, or found my way to the board of Decision Education Foundation. I might never had the platform to accomplish the humanitarian efforts that have already been so important to me. So it all came together in the right way for me because I realized that, in the end, the only way you fail your mentors is by failing to fulfill your potential by finding the thing that makes you happiest.
So that was my message to the students. I mean it wasn’t like I could talk about my Nobel Prize winning research like some of the other speakers! I left on Friday, thinking I was going to play The Bike tournament. And my flight was delayed 4 hours. I have been having horrible luck with travel lately. By the time I finally got home to LA I didn’t get to sleep until almost 6 am so I was too exhausted to even play The Bike. I wish I had known because I certainly would have stayed an extra day at the summit. All around, the return flight being delayed really screwed my. But hey, at least there wasn’t a drunk lady on that flight. Way to go Continental!
Tags: Adventures of the Mind, Ante Up For Africa, Einstein, Game Theory, Institute of Advanced Study, John von Neumann, Mozilla, Nobel Prize, Pixar, Princeton, Twitter
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Thursday, August 20, 2009 - Annie Duke
This week is a sad one for me. Ken Bacon, President of Refugees International, passed away this week. Ken was an extraordinary individual with an amazing passion for finding lasting solutions to the refugee problem around the world. He was a Wall Street Journal reporter who became chief Pentagon spokesman under Clinton. He joined RI in 2001.
I met Ken Bacon in October, during the filming of The Celebrity Apprentice. Because Ante Up for Africa was in the process of becoming a 501c3 while the Apprentice was filming, I couldn’t play directly for my own charity. So I played for RI which is aligned in its mission with the mission of AUFA. At my first meeting with Ken I presented him with a $245K check from winning a task on Celebrity Apprentice and to say his reaction was reserved would be a drastic understatement. I was a little taken aback until I figured out the he was just an incredible sincere individual. We ended up chatting for a very long time about the issues in Sudan and Darfur and I could see the passion and real commitment to the issue that this man had.
I saw Ken a few times after that, once at the filming of the final task of the Apprentice where without Ken’s help I don’t think I could have pulled the auction off. The last time I saw him was for the 30th Anniversary Gala of Refugees International where I presented that $245K check again to a much greater reaction.
Ken brought a passion to the cause that I hope to emulate. We should all be so lucky to have someone like Ken Bacon fighting for us and the things we believe in. I am truly lucky to have known him, if even for such a brief time. I am certainly a better person for the time I got with him.
Tags: Ante Up For Africa, Celebrity Apprentice, Clinton, Ken Bacon, refugees international
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Monday, August 10, 2009 - Annie Duke
So I have been back from DC now for a week and really feeling settled in for the first time since the WSOP ended. I left for Vegas at the end of May and came back mid July. That is a long time away from home and I really wanted to just settled back in to my routine in LA. But I turned around less than a week later to head to DC to lobby for the Poker Players Alliance (www.joinpps.org) and for Refugees International and Enough Project (www.refugeesinernational.org www.enoughproject.org) . That all went great with movement on both fronts. I am happy to say that Senator Menendez dropped his bill to legalize peer to peer games this week. You can read all about the bill at http://theppa.org/special/s1597/ This kind of movement on the legislative front is huge and is what the PPA has been working towards for the past three years. On the House of Representatives side of things, the frontier is looking rosy as well with Rep. Frank introducing H.R. 2166. http://theppa.org/special/dc/ which calls for the licensing and regulation of the online gaming industry which would bring us in line with hour The UK and 25 other countries handle online gaming. These pieces of legislation both have bipartisan support which shows that this is an issue that crosses party lines because across the board from the standpoint of consumer protection, civil liberties, protection of minors, world trade, etc. UIGEA is just bad government policy and members of both parties are recognizing that. It is really gratifying to see the work that many of us have done taking frequent trips to Capitol Hill to talk to lawmakers coming to fruition. And the support of the over 1 million people who have joined the PPA is responsible for those efforts and the powerful voice that poker players have in our nation’s capital. We should all be patting ourselves on the back for taking action.
On the Sudan front, the people we met with were very receptive to reexamining the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between North and South Sudan. It was a very educational day for me listening to Omer Ismail and Melanie Tiff talk about the issues. I am very familiar with how to lobby the poker issue. Watching these passionate individuals talk the Sudan issue was incredible and really reaffirmed my passion for the issue.
After I was done lobbying, my family and I spent the rest of the vacation doing the monuments and Smithsonians. The Holocaust Museum is a must for anyone going to DC. Obviously, it is so moving to see the artifacts and stories from Nazi Germany but they also have a section in there on Sudan and I was able to bring my children through there and touch them about the work that Ante Up for Africa does in a way that just talking to them about it could never do. They have an amazing interactive section of the museum where the kids could read personal stories from people affected by the conflict there. And the fact that it was related to the holocaust really helped bring it home for them. They saw the idea that when we say, “Never again” that we really need to live that because if we let our guards down then “never again” means nothing as it will happen again and again as it has throughout human history.
Anyway, the whole experience was really moving. But we are all happy to be home. And I am ecstatic to be sleeping in my own bed every night, doing Bikram everyday and cooking dinner for my kids in my own kitchen again.
Tags: Annie Duke, Ante Up For Africa, Enough Project, Gaming Regulations, poker players alliance, refugees international, Vegas, WSOP
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