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Dan Kennedy (1:09)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Here's one for Moth listeners in Minnesota. The Moth is coming to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can join us on Friday, November 11th for When Worlds Come Stories from the Clash. For more information and tickets, visit themoth.org.

Jeffrey Zakarian (1:30)

This podcast is brought to you by the Lambs Club Restaurant and Bar helmed by Food Network favorite chef Jeffrey Zakarian. The iconic Stanford White design building at 130 West 44th street between 6th Avenue and Broadway was the epicenter of American theater for the 20th century. The building was originally opened in 1905 as home home to the prestigious Lambs, America's first professional theatrical club. The elite membership roster read like a who's who of American theater. The Barrymores, Charlie Chaplin, George M. Cohen, John Wayne, Douglas Fairbanks and Fred Astaire.

Dan Kennedy (2:10)

The story you're about to hear by Annie Duke was recorded live at the Moth in July. The theme of the night was stories of strategy.

Annie Duke (2:24)

So when people see me deal cards, they always ask me, oh, are you left handed? But I'm actually not left handed. I'm actually very right handed and I tell them no. But I actually learned to deal cards before I learned how to write, because cards were very much a part of my family. They were much a very part of how all of us related to each other. And you would walk into my house and there was a little hallway and then a stairwell that would Go up. That kind of divided these two sides of the house. And if you went over to the right, there was my father's study, my teetotaler professor bearded father's study with the shag white carpet and the orange furniture, and this little kitchenette in the back with a refrigerator that had our wacky packages stickers on it. And he was a beloved professor at this school and he was very hardworking. But I could stop anytime, I could get him to stop working anytime by sitting down on the floor of his study and playing cards. My dad, my brother and me, and we would do this almost every night and on the weekend afternoons. And I was seven and my father was this middle aged man, and my brother was two years older than me, he was nine, which in card years might as well have been a middle aged man as well, because he was a lot better than me. And we weren't playing games like Go Fish or Crazy Eights or games that you would expect, you know, a seven and a nine year old to be playing with their dad. No, we were playing these very adult games, games like gin and hearts and. And this game called oh Hell, which was a sort of simplified version of bridge. And we would play these games. And of course, because my brother was older than me and my dad was like 35, I would never win. And every single night, every time we played the card game would end the exact same way, with me picking up the deck of cards and just slinging it against the wall in tears, screaming tantrum and storming out of the room. And you would think if I was playing this much that at some point somebody would have given me a lesson about how to be a good loser. But not my father, for example. My father was a really competitive regional tennis player. We were in New Hampshire, he played on the regional circuit in New England. And he was actually quite good. He had a lot of championships, but he had this electrolyte imbalance. And an electrolyte imbalance, when your electrolytes go out of balance, it kind of causes you to cramp. So he would go out in the August humidity, the humidity, you know, that gets so sticky on this east coast. And he would go out and he would play the semifinal match and he would just leave everything on the court sweating in the August humidity in New Hampshire. And we would bring him home and he would go upstairs to bathe and sort of wash off the match. And my mother and I would sort of hear this thready Dee Dee, which was my mother's name, Dee Dee. And we would Go upstairs. And there would be my 6 foot 4 naked father in the bathtub. There's his penis, which of course, like, that's another story. I'm not going to go into that now, but I'll have to come back another night for that. And he would be cramped into the shape of a bathtub because the imbalance was so bad that every muscle in his body would have seized up. And so he's cramped into the shape of the bathtub and my mother and I are prying him out of this bathtub, trying to cover him with a towel and dragging him downstairs to try to get him into the back of our diaper yellow Renault Le car, which was like the smart car of the 70s, but if anybody remembers it, it wasn't very smart. So it was this little sardine tin can of a car. And we're wedging my 6 foot 4 bathtub shaped dad into the back of this car. And the only way to get him in there is to sort of roll him onto his back, wedge him in, roll the window down so that we could Prop his size 14 AAA feet hanging out of the window, flapping in the wind as we got him to the hospital. And he would get an IV and he would stay there for a few hours until his electrolytes had been replenished. And you would think that a san, a sane human being would have withdrawn from the tournament, but no, he would go back the next day and play the finals. So this was the lesson that I had that you don't lose and you certainly aren't allowed to quit. And so while every night I would throw a tantrum and throw the cards against the wall and storm out of the room in tears five minutes later, I would always come back begging for more to play again and try again. And I would just cry to my father, dad, dad, why can't you let me win? Just let me win one time. And he would say, no, this is something that you have to earn on your own. But you know, the rest of my relationship with my dad was actually quite, quite quiet. It was very nurturing. He was the one who took me to the Red Sox games and the zoo and the museum. And every night he was the one who, who tucked me in. And he would lie down, he called it a lie with. He would lie down and we'd talk about the day and he would read me a story. And it was really quite lovely. But when you walked into my house on the left side, if you went to the left instead of the right, there was the kitchen. And at the kitchen table was my mother. And I remember her. I have this memory of her my whole time I was growing up, as if she had sort of just rolled out of bed, as if it didn't matter what time of day it was. She had always just gotten out of bed. Because I remember her sitting at this kitchen table in her yoked nightgown, and she had short hair with the little, you know, puff of hair that was sort of ratted up, as it will if your head's been lying on a pillow and you've been sleeping. And it was this still life with mom sitting at the table with her cigarette in her brass ashtray and her glass of scotch, her cheap scotch. It was VAT 69, which is like the Boone's Farm of scotches. Because my mother was an alcoholic. And she was an alcoholic for most of the time that I was growing up. And I was the one in the family who decided that this was something that I had to control, which, of course, created this incredibly tumultuous relationship with my mother. When she was having people over, I was the one who. Who was cleaning up and screaming at her that I had to do this. And I was the one who was pouring her alcohol down the sink and marking her bottle when she had promised that, yes, she wouldn't drink anymore. And I was the one who would take her cigarettes and tear them up and throw them in the trasher in my most evil moments. I would fill the carton with water and put it in the freezer where she could find her ruined cigarettes, frozen when she needed one. But my mom would sit at this table all day and she would play solitaire. And this is what she did all day. She did not join in our family games. She just sat there and played solitaire. And when I really needed her, I knew that if I went up to her, particularly on a weekend afternoon, and brought my own deck of cards and sat down next to her and started playing solitaire beside her, that that was when things would be good, because that was when we could talk and she could be my mother and we could have a quiet time. And we weren't fighting with each other, and we weren't angry at each other. We just played side by side. So it was this interesting contrast when I was growing up where my relationship with my father away from the cards was actually quite quiet. It was quite nice. It was very nurturing. But when we were actually playing cards, it was very emotionally violent. Granted, emotionally violent, but my own doing, but emotionally violent. Whereas with My mother, everything outside of the games that we played side by side was so hard and so conflicted. But when we sat down at that table together, when I sat down with her, it was very quiet. So when I was 17, I went out into the world and it was right at this time that my mother actually went into rehab. But I was leaving the house at that point. So I really never got a chance to experience as a child a sober mother. So I had seen what had happened to my mother. My mother, who was the smartest person I had ever met, the smartest person who I have still ever met, who had 1600s on her SATs. And I had seen her spend my whole childhood at the kitchen table, which by my father's standards, my father who was out there in the world winning tennis tournaments and being this beloved professor, was complete failure. And I knew that I did not want to be that, that whatever happened, I could not become her. And in my 17 year old mind I thought, well, I know how to do that. I'll just be my father in the most literal sense. I'll go out and I will become a teacher, I will become a professor, because if I do that, then I won't be my mom. So I went to Columbia and then I went on to UPenn to go get a PhD. And I was very good at it because of course I didn't know how to fail at anything. So I got straight A's and I had a National Science foundation fellowship. And this was my sole focus, to go down the path of my father, who I so completely wanted to identify with. And as I was in graduate school, there was always something that was kind of nagging me, like maybe, maybe this isn't my passion, maybe this isn't lighting me up inside, maybe it's not what I'm supposed to do. But of course I wasn't allowed to admit that to myself because that would have been failure. If I admitted that, then that would have been becoming my mother. My mother who had met my father at Harvard while they were both becoming teachers and she had quit that path to sit at a kitchen table. So as I was going to my first job talk, I was driving along and I was driving to New York. And by this time my mom, my sober mother, had, had moved to New York and she had an apartment there. So I was driving there to stay with her before I went to my first job talk at nyu. And I got to her house and I arrived at night and we had dinner and it was, you know, quite nice. And we were talking. And after dinner I started throwing up. And I started throwing up again, and I threw up again. And I was violently throwing up the whole night. And it became clear as dawn broke and I was still very sick, that there was going to be no going to this job talk. And my mother, very concerned about me as the day went on, took me to the hospital. And I had been in the hospital for two weeks, very, very sick on IVs. And the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. They kept trying to figure out what was physically wrong with me. But I knew, I knew somewhere inside that they were looking in the wrong place. Because I was actually just having a nervous breakdown because I didn't know how to walk away from this and I didn't know how to fail. And I think that somewhere, somewhere inside of my mother, she saw what was happening to me. I think that she really understood that I was having that moment of crisis that perhaps she had when she was younger. And she saw that maybe she could direct me on a better path than she had gone. And she said something to me. She said, you know, Annie, just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it. But I didn't hear her. I didn't hear what she really meant by that because all I heard, all I heard was, oh, that's just an excuse for the fact that you didn't do anything. That's all that is. So now I'm just sick. I obviously had to cancel all of my job talks. I'm too sick to go back to school. I don't know how my life has gotten so out of control. I've actually just gotten married, so the only place for me to go is to Montana, where my husband at the time had actually bought a house. So I end up in this little town called Columbus, Montana. 1200 people. This half Jew liberal, Ivy League educated girl from the east coast among ranchers and Republicans in, you know, cow country, in this 1200 person town, in this house that had cost my husband $11,000. And boy, did I think he had gotten ripped off. It was made of chicken wire and stucco and it had no foundation and no hot water. And the only way to turn the lights on was to grab a Frankenstein breaker in the kitchen and pull it down. So here I am. Now I have no money. I've just run away from school. I can't figure out how my life has gotten here. And all I know is that I've failed. I failed my father. I failed everything. That I thought that I was going to be. And I called my brother up, I said, I don't know what to do, I have no money, I don't know what I'm going to do. And he said, you know, there's some card games, there's some poker games in Billings, which is about 40 miles away. I'll teach you a little bit about the game and maybe you could go play that while you're trying to figure all of this out and trying to figure out what you want to do. All right, so I get in my car and I drive to Billings. And the game is in this, this bar in downtown Billings called the Crystal Lounge, which is as seedy as it sounds. And if you wanted to get drugs in Billings, that would have been a good place to go. And there was actually this guy, this pimp from Bed Stuy. He had gotten there because he was actually escaping a murder charge and his name was Ice Cream and he had Jerry Curl and like the magenta suit. Like this was awesome. So I go into this seedy bar and I asked where the game was. And they direct you to this little door in the back. And you go and you descend down these narrow stairs into the basement of the Crystal Lounge. And you enter the room and get hit in the face with the smoke because of course it's Marlboro country. And I went in and I sit down this, this 24 year old girl among these old middle aged men and I start to play cards. And in that moment I realized it was like I was home. It was like I was on my dad's shag carpet playing with my father these very adult games. But now I was coming to it as an adult and so I could win because like my mother, I was smart and I was smarter than they were. And now it was my chance to win. And when I sat down and I started playing, it was the first time. It was the first time that I actually felt peace. It was the first time in a long time that I wasn't afraid. And I realized that I had spent all of this time trying to make sure that I wasn't like my mother and I was just like my dad. But when I sat down at the poker table, that's when I made my way back to both of them.