Four Kinds of Male Poker Players: Rational, Angry, Disrespecting, Flirting | Annie Duke | Big Think

Four Kinds of Male Poker Players: Rational, Angry, Disrespecting, Flirting

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From “frigid bitch” to “cunt,” Annie Duke is no stranger to name-calling at the table. She’s even classified the men she has met into categories.

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Annie Duke:

Annie Duke has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Thanks to this fellowship, she studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What obstacles have you found as a female poker player?

Annie Duke: I personally haven’t found any obstacles. I think that’s because I am very focused on what my goals are in the game. My goals aren’t social ones. If I had goals that were social in nature, if I felt like I wanted to always have good social interactions with people at the table, that I didn’t want to have negative reactions with people at the table, then there would be obstacles to being a woman. I don’t think about it that way. People having negative reactions to me at the table is actually a good thing. It means they are emotionally wrapped up in my existence, which means they are not going to play well. That’s not true for a lot of women. What I can tell you is that the downside to being a female in this world because poker doesn’t have the same kind of glass ceiling because nobody is hiring you. Nobody is setting your salary. There aren’t a lot of the negatives that happen in business where you won’t get promoted because your boss is a chauvinistic ass-hole, or you are getting paid less than your male colleagues, that stuff doesn’t exist here because you are playing by your own wits, it’s our own money, and you’re just winning money according to how much better in the game you are.

That being said, when I was playing in Montana, I got called very bad names on a daily basis. I would win a hand and it would be just a random hand, and the person would look at me and say, “You fucking cunt.” I’m not kidding. That happened to me pretty much every day, which is an interesting reaction to losing a hand of poker. What you would consider sexual harassment or things that wouldn’t be okay in every day interaction become fair game in a lot of player’s minds at the poker table. Some how they feel like because you have agreed to sit down at the table that they are allowed to treat you however they want because it was your choice to sit down in their world. They seemed to think that it was okay to be using those words in relation to me.

Now, that would be a very big negative for most women, .being treated that way. I remember one time I won a hand from someone and he looked at me and he called me a frigid bitch, which was really weird. I’ve been really overtly and disgustingly hit on at the table. I was playing in a game once with somebody who – I won’t say who they are, but they were actually a very famous television producer, and [he] kept saying to me, “Can I look in your hole?” “What’s in your hole?” “Can I get in there?” Because you have hole cards. They thought they were being funny with this pun. I was playing once with a famous actor who was eating lamb chops at the table, and he said, “Hey, do you want to try my meat?” After he was done with his meat, he lifted up the bone and he said, “What about my bone?” Obviously, none of that is appropriate in pretty much any circumstance, but I get faced with that regularly. Again, most women I think would find that a negative, a downside. A lot of women end up not coming back to the table because they are treated that way. It didn’t bother me because I didn’t look at it as any kind of statement on who I was or whether that was appropriate because, again, it wasn’t like these people were my bosses. It wasn’t their job to hire me.

Question: How do you get back at them?

Annie Duke: As a good poker player, what you are doing is you are watching the way that somebody behaves at the table.

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