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Professional competitor Annie Duke recalls the best and worst advice she’s received during her career.

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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: How much time did you put in before you got good?

Annie Duke: I’m still waiting to be really good. I’ll let you know. Stick a pin in that one. I’ve been playing for 15 years, I’m waiting. I mean, the fact is, that has to be the case because poker is a game of decision making under conditions of uncertainty so that you don’t see your opponents cards, you can’t ever become a master of the game because it’s not mathematically solvable. You can get better at solving it, you can get closer to a solution, you can get better at behaving properly toward the range of hands that your opponent might be holding-- mathematically properly I mean, in terms of equity decisions-- you can get better at narrowing down the range of hands that your opponent could be holding. [In] an ideal world, we get it down to one hand and then we would always behave perfectly, but we can’t do that. I am much better than I was when I started, but I will never have it solved. I mean, you just can’t. That’s what allows us to grow as players and it’s what allows us to continue to become better. I don’t think that I’m great. I am striving to become great. I am going to be striving toward that goal for my whole life. The realistic answer to your question is, I started in ’94, and I started being really successful at the game around 1998.

Question: What’s the best advice you were ever given?

Annie Duke: When I first started playing, I was very focused on the bad things that happened to me that were out of my control. My brother had to give me this advice over and over again. It took a few years to really sink in, but my brother said to me – we call it moaning. You’re moaning about your luck. You’re moaning about your hands. He said to me, not only does nobody want to hear you moan, which is true because we’ve all seen every bad hand that’s happened. I don’t need to hear it. The piece of advice that he gave me [that] was so important was not that nobody wants to hear you moan, it was; what productive thing is coming out of moaning? In what way is moaning productive? He is totally right about this. All you are doing when you are moaning is bemoaning your bad luck. “Oh, I had the best hand, and he had the worst hand and he won.” You’re not doing anything to analyze the hand; you’re not doing anything constructive. Did I do something wrong in the hand? Could I have taken a different line of play? Should I have been involved in the hand in the first place? Those things might help you become a better poker player. When you’re moaning, all you are doing is focusing on things that were not in your control, at least you are not exploring whether they were in your control, which is bad. You’re just focusing on the one piece of bad variance that happened. There’s nothing productive that comes from it.

Question: What’s the worst advice you were given?

Annie Duke: When I first started playing, there was a person who decided they wanted to mentor me. This was outside, obviously my main mentor was my brother, and the majority of the beginnings of my poker knowledge came from him. I developed into my own player because you have to be. People react to different personalities differently. My brother and I have different personalities, but he gave me all of my fundamentals. He gave me the bricks and mortar upon which my poker game was built. There was this person in Billings, Montana when I first started playing who decided they wanted to mentor me.

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