Annie Duke Brother
Epic Development: Annie Duke League Suspends Brother. Written by: C Costigan. Published on: Sep/22/2011. The Epic Poker League has suspended Howard Lederer. Then again, most poker players aren’t Annie Duke. After pursuing a psychology Ph.D. On childhood language acquisition, Duke turned her skills to the poker table, where she has taken home over $4 million in lifetime earnings. For a time she was the leading female money winner in World Series of Poker history, and remains in the top five.
Bloomberg joined the list of mainstream media outlets choosing to ignore the real truth about poker community pariah Annie Duke, putting her latest book on a Must-Reads of 2018 list this week.
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Cass R. Sunstein may have actually read Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. However, he clearly failed to look into its author’s past.
Regardless of the publication’s quality, it’s doubtful a former Barack Obama White House Administrator like Sunstein would have made the book part of his best of 2018 list had some the crimes Duke perpetrated against the poker community been revealed to him.
He certainly would have avoided referring to Duke as “a winner of the World Series of Poker,” had he bothered to check the facts.
A winner ‘at’ the WSOP is not the winner ‘of’ the WSOP
The truth is that Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner. She won a $2,000 tournament by beating a field of 234 players in the relatively obscure poker variant of Omaha Hi-Lo Split in 2004. She also won a 10-player invitation, winner-take-all WSOP Tournament of Champions freeroll that year although it didn’t come with a bracelet.
By the way, the $2 million Duke won in that freeroll equals almost half of her $4,270,548 in career tournament earnings. A number that sounds a lot less impressive when you are aware of that fact.
To consider her record, it may be fair to characterize Duke as a winner “at” the WSOP. However, the winner “of” the WSOP is a label probably best reserved for the winner of the WSOP Main Event.
Regardless, it’s clear the poker community would rather mainstream media outlets not refer to Duke at all. At the very least, printing the facts about her past transgressions when they do would be a good start.
The truth about Annie Duke
Duke was the commissioner of the now-defunct Epic Poker League. She collected a paycheck from the league while it piled up millions in debt and filed for bankruptcy. She got hers while players were defrauded, with Epic failing to come through on a $1 million freeroll promise.
Duke was also one of the faces of the now-defunct online poker site Ultimate Bet.
She was never implicated in the site’s well-publicized super-user cheating scandal. This involved a group of Ultimate Bet insiders led by 1994 WSOP Main Event champ Russ Hamilton gaining access to other players’ hole card information. They used it to rip them off for upwards of $22 million.
Duke still collected money for endorsing the site, ignoring the involvement of site management and various consultants who tried to cover up the scandal. Looking back, the poker community now sees any endorsement of Ultimate Bet as an affront to the community itself. And they’re not wrong in thinking that.
Oh brother, where art thou?
Finally, there’s the fact that Duke’s brother is Full Tilt Poker founder and board member Howard Lederer.
It’s hard to forget that when the US Department of Justice kicked Full Tilt out of the country in April 2011, Lederer and other Full Tilt owners walked away with some $150 million worth of players’ money.
The DOJ accused Full Tilt of defrauding its players. It also referred to the organization as a Ponzi scheme when the shut down revealed its owners were raiding player funds to pay themselves. The DOJ accused Lederer of taking more than $40 million for himself.
PokerStars bailed out Fill Tilt a year later and settled the case. PokerStars paid back most of that $150 million to players through the DOJ. Lederer settled, admitted no wrongdoing, and gave up assets worth just $2.5 million.
Of course, nothing is implicating Duke in the Full Tilt scandal. However, unlike the mainstream media, I don’t think it’s fair to write an article mentioning her without also mentioning of the kinds of things her and her brother have done to the poker community.
Bloomberg’s Must-Reads of 2018: Annie Duke’s bio
Most US poker players still have bad taste in their mouths from previous interactions with Duke. Like most of them, I haven’t shelled out the $18 for her book.
What I can glean from the title and various blurbs is that it is about the rather common poker-player practice of treating real-life decisions like poker decisions. It’s an interesting concept. One poker player’s know works for many aspects of their lives. Most wish somebody, other than Duke, was out there selling it to the mainstream.
Sunstein says the book is full of wisdom, fun, warmth, humor and humanity. You can probably guess that most poker players think this would have to be the first example of Duke displaying any of these traits.
Sunstein calls Duke’s analysis sharp and data-driven. We can only wish he would have at least peeked into Duke’s past. Then we could say the same about his.
Most poker players didn’t go to graduate school for cognitive linguistics. Then again, most poker players aren’t Annie Duke.
After pursuing a psychology Ph.D. on childhood language acquisition, Duke turned her skills to the poker table, where she has taken home over $4 million in lifetime earnings. For a time she was the leading female money winner in World Series of Poker history, and remains in the top five. She’s written two books on poker strategy, and next year will release a book called Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.
Don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well.
In it, Duke parlays her experience with cards into general lessons about decision making that are relevant for all of us. If a well-reasoned decision leads to a negative outcome, was it the wrong decision? How do we distinguish between luck and skill? And how do we move beyond our cognitive biases?
Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, sat down with Duke in October to talk to her about life and poker.
How did you get into science?
From when I was very young I set out on an academic path. My parents were both teachers. My dad taught at a small private school in New England. My mother taught at the local public school until she had babies. (It was the ’60s, and that was the usual path for women then.) I grew up on the campus of the school and then went to Columbia. When I entered Columbia I thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps and major in English and go on to graduate school. In my family, it was really this idea of, “Where are you going to go to graduate school?” not “if.” I ended up double majoring in English and psychology. The whole time I was at Columbia, I worked in Barbara Landau’s lab as a research assistant. She was looking at first language acquisition, which was a topic I fell in love with—it’s what I ended up actually studying when I went to graduate school.
What interested you in language acquisition?
You end up studying kind of the whole ecosystem of what learning looks like. What’s the brain doing that it can learn this very, very complex system so quickly? A 1-year-old does very well with new languages, and that’s interesting in terms of brain plasticity and learning. Then there’s the question of how a baby figures out what goes with what. There are a lot of noises flying around and the child has to figure out what are words and what aren’t. Nobody hands the child a map or a key. Then the child has to figure out where the boundaries are. How do you figure out what the end of a word is? How do you figure out what the end of a phrase is? It’s really thinking about this very uncertain system. So, I started off very young in my academic career saying, “I’m really interested in these sort of uncertain systems, and how you take feedback in an uncertain system and actually map it properly and try to learn from it.”
That’s the hidden information problem. We know the facts that we know, but there may be facts that we don’t know.
What was your approach in graduate school?
Landau sent me on my way to Penn to study with Lila and Henry Gleitman, whom she’d studied under. Lila was actually a student of Noam Chomsky, who argues that grammar is built into our brains just like math is. If you have this kind of access to the grammar, it narrows down the uncertainty in the system. I began looking at something called syntactic bootstrapping. The idea was that if the child has access to a built-in grammar, then you can get a long way to actually being able to bootstrap the meaning of words from that. I also looked at the rhythm of mothers’ speech to children to show that the rhythm actually mirrors the grammatical structure of the language. That means the child has access to the grammar through the rhythm of maternal speech.
How did you get into poker from academia?
Right at the end of graduate school I got sick. Landed in the hospital for two weeks. Had a very bad stomach problem. Didn’t figure out what was wrong with me for a long time. It’s something that sort of flares and goes, and flares and goes. But it was right as I was supposed to be going and doing all of my job talks. I called all the places I had job talks at and said, “You know what? I really need to wait a second because I’m sick.” So, I delayed everything until the next season. Just rescheduled. So, I went off and had this sort of year off in 1992. I’m like, “Okay. Well, now what am I going to do?” I started playing poker in that year, which sounds kind of crazy, but it’s actually not that accidental because my brother, when he was 18, had moved to New York to study chess. His name is Howard Lederer. And he had moved to New York to study chess with a grandmaster, and actually landed in a poker game along the way. He lost his college fund, which was $6,300, by the way, but that turned out to pay off really well. By the time he was 21, he was one of the best players in the world. By the time he was 23, he had made the final table of the World Series of Poker. So my brother made the suggestion, “You’ve got this time off and you need some money. Why don’t you try playing poker to make some money while you’re waiting to go back?” So, I did, and the wait was 20 years long.
Did you have an instant knack for poker?
I think that I had a big leg up. As part of my training in experimental psych, I had done a lot of statistics and probability work, which is really important to poker. I understood the rigor. And then I had done all this work on uncertainty, and I think that you have to deeply embed yourself in uncertainty in order to become good at poker. And then I also had the advantage of my brother who taught me all those lessons without me needing to lose my college fund like he had. He actually was incredibly helpful and really coached me. I spent a lot of time watching him play.
Do you think you were underestimated as a woman at the poker table, and could you use that to your advantage?
I started playing in Montana, weirdly, because during my time off I got married to a man whose family lived in Montana. So, we went and lived in Montana for a few years and I started playing in these little tiny bars. There was this bar called the Crystal Lounge, and a place across the way called the Monte Carlo. The Crystal Lounge had a poker room in the basement and it was sort of what you’d expect. Ranchers, people who were retired and were on disability, that kind of thing. I can’t imagine a lot of them are alive anymore, but if you could find one, I think they would tell you that I was the luckiest person that ever lived. They would not tell you I was any good. That was a big advantage, having them just think I was lucky.
Why is it that luck and skill can be so easily confused?
This is actually a topic that I go into very deeply in my book. I think about it the same way that I was thinking about the way you learn a first language. Now, what does a word apply to? Nobody gives you a map. Nobody tells you, “This was skill,” or, “This was luck.” Say you go through a green light and you get through safely. Was that skill or luck? Well, we know it’s some combination. Trying to figure out what combination is really hard. And that’s a very simple example. You get into these complex situations where the outcome is the result of multiple decisions. Sometimes the decision is incredibly remote from the outcome. I could make a decision about raising my kids or what my disciplinary style is when they’re 5, and not see the results until they’re 18. So, now they’re misbehaving when they’re 18—is it something that I did in the distant past? That gets very complicated. The problem is that you only have the outcome to look at.
You have to deeply embed yourself in uncertainty in order to become good at poker.
How should we deal with the fact that there is so much luck involved in decisions?
Wrap your arms around the uncertainty. Accept it. Know that the way things turn out has a lot of luck involved so don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well. Focus on process instead.
Say I have a fair coin. I can tell you exactly what the probability of heads or tails on the next flip is. But I can’t tell you what the next flip will be. That’s what accepting outcomes is like. Accepting that you don’t know if the coin will land heads or tails on the next flip. That means that if you offer me a $2-to-$1 gambling proposition on this coin, I should be willing to do that. Even if I lose the next 10 flips, that doesn’t mean that I made a bad decision. And I should strive to be happy that I made a good decision and not focus on the result. It’s a mindset thing.
Whatever Happened To Annie Duke
In life, it’s usually even more complicated because in most real decisions we haven’t examined the coin. We don’t know if it is a fair coin, if it has two sides with a heads and tails on it and is weighted properly. That’s the hidden information problem. We can’t see everything. We haven’t experienced everything. We know the facts that we know, but there may be facts that we don’t know. Then the job of the decider is to reduce the uncertainty as much as they possibly can, but to understand that they’re always working within a range and they have limited control over how things turn out on any given try.
Annie Duke Brother Howard
What mistakes do we make in evaluating our decisions?
There’s this word that we use in poker: “resulting.” It’s a really important word. You can think about it as creating too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision. You can’t use outcome quality as a perfect signal of decision quality, not with a small sample size anyway. I mean, certainly, if someone has gotten in 15 car accidents in the last year, I can certainly work backward from the outcome quality to their decision quality. But one accident doesn’t tell me much.
In chess, if I lose a game, it’s pretty certain that I made a bad decision somewhere and I can go look for it. That’s a totally reasonable strategy. But it is a very unreasonable strategy in poker. If I lose a hand, I may have played the hand literally perfectly and still lost because there’s this luck element to it. The problem is that we’re all resulters at heart. Think about the 2015 Super Bowl. The Seahawks are on the 1-yard line, they’re down by four, there’s 26 seconds left in the game, Pete Carroll has Russell Wilson throw and it’s intercepted. Do you remember what the headlines looked like the next day? “Worst play in Super Bowl history,” “What was he thinking?” “Idiot.” That kind of thing. But imagine it was caught—what do you think the headlines would have looked like then? The outcome was irrelevant to the decision quality. And just as a teaser, the decision quality was actually pretty brilliant. I won’t go into the details of why; you’ll have to read my book for that.
Also in PsychologyThe Pleasure and Pain of Speed
How long is now? According to Google, not much less than 250 milliseconds. In 2008, the company presented a research report that examined ideal “latency” times for search results. It concluded “that a response time over 1 second may interrupt...READ MORE