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- [00:00]
Intuit TurboTax
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Stamps.com
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Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The story that you're about to hear by Annie Duke was told live in Las Vegas at the 2012 public radio program Directors Conference, which is one of the sexiest things happening in Las Vegas. Actually, this is a story about the high stakes world of gambling, something we here at the Moth know very little about. But Annie Duke has a great story. Here's annie.
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Annie Duke
Okay, it's 2004, and I'm playing in a $2 million winner take all poker tournament called the Tournament of Champions. And I have two tens, and I have to decide whether to put the last of my remaining chips into the pot and risk getting knocked out. And I've already taken 15 seconds with this decision, and it's just way too long. See, in poker, you make these very complex mathematical calculations, these very deep reads of your opponents, and you have to do it all very quickly because there's 10 people at this table and the action needs to keep moving along. So 15 seconds in poker is an eternity. But I'm having tremendous difficulty with this decision, and there's a few reasons why. The first is that $2 million is just by far the largest amount of money that I have ever played for in my life. And in fact, earlier in the year in 2004, I had won a World Series of Poker Championship, a bracelet, and I had only won about 150,000. So $2 million just was putting a lot of pressure on me. But the second reason and the more important reason for me was that this was the first time that I'd played on television with these new little lipstick cameras that they were putting in the rail of the table that could see your hole cards and expose them to the world. And this was causing me a lot of difficulty in thinking about this hand. You see, ESPN and Harrah's World Series of Poker had invited what they said was the 10 best players in the world to come together and play this winner take all two million dollar championship against each other on television. And I was there among these nine great players, five of whom were hall of Famers and the knock on me was that I was only there because I was a woman. That while I was good, I wasn't actually one of the best players in the world, and that I didn't deserve to be there, because ESPN had just decided that since women were a novelty and poker, it would be really good to have a woman at the table. And in 2004, I was, in fact, the winningest woman in the history of the World Series at that time. So I was just the logical choice if they were going to put a woman there. But I actually didn't deserve to be there. And the problem for me was that I actually believed them. And so, for the first time, as I'm sitting here trying to decide whether to put my money in this pot with these two tens and risk getting knocked out, I realize that my mistakes might be exposed to the world, and I might prove all my critics right. And as 30 seconds have passed, I looked over at my brother, and my brother at that time and still actually was one of the best players in the world. And he, too, had been invited to this table to play this big tournament. And I looked over at him, and I just couldn't figure out how my life had gotten here. You see, about a decade before, when I was still in graduate school and living on a graduate student stipend and I couldn't really afford to go on a vacation, my brother had offered to fly me out to Las Vegas while he was playing in the World Series of Poker and put me up at the Golden Nugget for two weeks, which is just, like the most luxurious place I'd ever been at the time. And he brought me out for this vacation, and we're sitting here after midnight in the basement coffee shop of Binion's Horseshoe Casino, kind of a rundown casino on Fremont street with its faux Western decor. And you might say, well, why were you there after midnight eating? And the reason is that after midnight, they actually had $1.99 steak special. So for $1.99, you got a steak and a salad and a vegetable and a roll. And this was really awesome for someone who was living on a graduate student stipend. So that's why we're there. And my brother was eating with me, and he asked me how my vacation was going. He actually asked me if I was having any fun. And I said to him, in fact, actually, I'm kind of bored. My brother was playing poker all day at the World Series because he, at that time, was already one of the best players in the world. And you couldn't really watch poker back then. There was a rail, and it was just hard to watch. So that wasn't any fun for me. And I really don't enjoy gambling, which I know sounds kind of. I know because I'm a poker player. It sounds kind of crazy, but actually, poker is very different than gambling. And I didn't enjoy things like baccarat or craps or anything like that. And actually, one night, my brother's friends had kindly offered to sort of take on the burden of his sister entertainment and taking me over to Glitter Gulch, which is the seediest strip club you've ever seen down on Fremont Street Casino. And somehow seeing naked women grind their breasts against my brother's friends was not only fun, but slightly uncomfortable and unnerving. So I didn't really want to repeat that experience. So I just said to him, I really. I kind of don't have anything to do. And he said, well, why aren't you playing poker? You've watched me play so much poker. I said, well, I don't really know if I know what to do, Howard. And he took one of those little black Kino crayons out of the well that you fill the cards out with, and he took his napkin from the table, and he wrote down all the two card starting hands I was allowed to enter the pot with. He said, as long as you just play these hands, I promise you, you'll do okay. And he handed me this napkin and $100, and he sent me across the street clutching this napkin to the Fremont Casino, which, if anybody's in there, makes binions look like the Taj Mahal. At that time, the nicest restaurant in the Fremont was a Carl's Jr. So I went in there and I played this dollar to three game, and I actually won $300. That trip was like a lot of money. And very soon after that, I kind of caught the po. I left graduate school to pursue a life as a professional poker player. And I just. I loved the life because it was so anonymous. And people would ask me, they'd say, well, what do you do for a living? And I'd say, well, I play poker for a living. And they'd say, oh, where do you deal? I'd say, no, no, I don't deal cards to people I actually play. And they'd say, oh, what does your husband do? And I'd say, well, actually, he stays at home. I support the family. And usually the conversation would devolve into something about the merits of gamblers. Anonymous, which has a lot of merits, but I don't think for me. But I loved that. I loved that people didn't understand what I did, and that I was eccentric, because I valued eccentricity so much. And I loved that nobody was going to know who I was. And I was doing this in private on the margins of society, because at that time, nobody in poker could have imagined that ESPN would be airing this big thing that 3 million people might watch because we were just poker players. But the other thing that was so great about what I did was that I wasn't the only one who was anonymous. My cards were anonymous, so I was the only one who could see them because they were face down, which meant that when I made mistakes, I was the only one who saw them. And that was kind of good and bad, because as I started to find success, I was on my way at that point to being sort of the winningest woman in poker during the 90s. People started to say, she seems to be pretty good. She seems to have a lot of talent. And that felt really good for people to be saying those nice things about me. But all I saw while I was playing was my own mistakes. And so what went along with that was that I started to feel just a little bit like a fraud. In fact, I started to feel a lot like a fraud. So now here I AM with these two tens at this table, and 45 seconds has passed, and I'm so afraid that the world is going to now find out what I already know about myself, which is that I'm a fraud. And I'm trying to make this poker decision. And one of the other problems for me is that I'm against this guy named Greg Ramer. And Greg Ramer, I had opened the pot with these two tens, and he had pushed all his chips in, and he has more than I do. So I'm trying to make this decision whether to risk all my chips against this guy, and. And I just really don't know anything about him because he's just come on the scene a few months before, nobody had ever heard of him, and all of a sudden, he won the main event of the World Series of Poker in July of that year. So I've never actually played a hand of poker with him. And the only thing I really know about him is that his nickname is the Fossil Man. And the reason why he's called the Fossil man is because he plays with these fossils as his card protectors. He sticks them on top of his cards. And the thing I know is that if you manage to knock him out, which is completely impossible on this hand because I have fewer chips than he does. But if at some point during the tournament I could knock him out, I know that he'll give me one of these fossils, which, you know, in comparison to the $2 million prize, not really what I'm trying to win, but I guess it would be something. I really just have no idea how to figure out what he has. And the poker decision itself should actually be quite easy. I've got two tens, and if he has a hand like aces or kings, I'm actually just supposed to fold because those are much better than my hand. And if he has a hand like an ace or a king, I'm supposed to call. But I'm having trouble focusing on the poker. And as 60 seconds has passed at this table, I hear somebody myself, actually, as if it's someone else outside of my body apologizing to this table of these nine great players, these five hall of Famers, my brother saying, I'm so sorry. I know I'm taking too long, but this is just a really hard decision. And what I know is that the other people at the table think that the hard decision is the poker decision. But what I know is that the hard decision is that I'm so afraid of making a mistake, and I can't decide whether I'm just making a decision about trying not to lose so I can last with my little bit of chips and not be the first one out, so everybody will know that I really didn't deserve to be there. And as I'm trying to figure this out, I looked over at my brother, my mentor, trying to find some sort of solace, trying to find some sort of way out of what was going on in my head. And in that moment, I remembered that we had watched Raymer playing the main event on TV that week. They had actually just started airing it the week before we came in to play this. And we had seen Greg Raymer play a hand against a guy named Mike, named Mike Matisot. And my brother had pointed out in a hand where Greg had a really good hand, that Greg did something. There was something he did called a tell that telegraphed that his hand was really good. And as I was looking at my brother, I suddenly remembered this. And I looked back over at Ramer, and I saw him do that thing that my brother had pointed out when he had watched him on television. And I knew in that moment that he had to have a really good hand. He had to have those aces or kings and that I could easily fold my tens because it was the right poker choice and I did it confidently. But the problem was that this was the hand right before dinner, which meant that we were now going to have to get up from the table, all 10 of us, and we were going to have to go out and sort of take an hour. Me with my little bit of chips left and as we were walking out the door to go take our hour break, Phil Hellmuth, 12 time world champion Phil Hellmuth the poker brat, six five towering over me, reader of souls says to me, annie, I know you had to have jacks or tens on that hand, don't you know Raymer had to have ace, king. It was totally obvious to me and all the confidence that I had found in that hand just seconds before just went out of me. And I was left for an hour in my room at the Rio, ruminating, filled with self doubt that while I might have fooled myself into thinking I was making a good poker decision at the time, that clearly I had just made a decision to try not to lose so that I wouldn't prove anybody right. So I came back to the table after what seemed like an eternity and clearly with no focus, with no ability to really feel like I could be playing well. But the great thing in poker is that sometimes the cards save you from yourself, they save you from your own self doubt. You just get really good cards that really just aren't hard to play because you just kind of win every hand. And that's actually what happened to me. I came back and I had two queens against Johnny Chan's two eights and I won this really big pot and then I actually had a really big hand against Greg Raymer where I took a lot of his chips and, and I wasn't the first one out of the tournament or the second one out of the tournament or the third one out or even the fourth one out or the fifth one. And now all of a sudden we're five people left in the tournament and I get in this huge pot against Greg Ramer, the fossil man, the person who had put me to such a difficult decision earlier and this time I have more chips than he does and we get all the money in and I actually knock Greg Ramer out and he picks up his fossil and he brings it around to me and as he hands me this fossil, my gift for knocking him out of the tournament, he whispers in my ear, annie, I know the hand you had earlier was really hard for you and I want you to know that I had two kings and you made a really good fold. So in that moment, Greg Ramer gave me not just the gift of the fossil, but the gift of my confidence back. And in that moment, I realized that I could start playing to win again. And now we were four people left, and I had the most chips, and the next one out was Johnny Chan. And then actually it was just three handed me, my brother and Phil Hellmuth. And I got in a huge hand against my brother and actually knocked my own brother out of the tournament. He's sitting right over there and you might say, like, how could you do that? How could you knock your own brother out of the tournament? In fact, three weeks later, when the tournament aired, the minute after that hand aired on television, my mother called me up, said, annie, how could you knock your own brother out of this tournament? And I said, well, now I know who your favorite is. Would you have rather him knocked me out, Mom? But anyway, my brother was actually, he wasn't happy for himself, but he was happy for me because he taught me how to play and he taught me how to play hard. And he would have expected me to play just as hard against him as anybody else. And I suppose if he was going to lose all of his chips, he probably was happy he lost some to me. And as he was getting up to go out of the room, he came around, he gave me a big hug. He said, annie, you're really playing great now. Just beat Phil. So now it was heads up against Phil Hellmuth, the thief of my confidence. And I got in a big pot with him when I had more chips and I had King 10 and he had 10 8. And I won the hand and I actually beat Phil to collect the two million dollars prize in the tournament to collect the two million dollar prize in the tournament that no one thought I even deserved to be at. And now when people ask me what the most important hand of poker I ever played in my life is, I don't say it was the king 10 that I beat Phil Hellmuth with to win that big prize. I say it was the two tens that I found such a difficult fold with. Because sometimes it's not the really big things that you do that get you the win. It's the really big things that you don't do. Thank you.
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Dan Kennedy
For two decades, Annie Duke was one of the top poker players in the world. Annie recently founded How I Decide, a non profit business that teaches decision making skills to underserved youth. Annie currently resides in the Philadelphia area with her four children and actually her story is featured in the modern Moth book called the 50 True Stories. You can find out more about the book@themost.org hey, something else I wanted to tell you about the Moth Story Slam. Those are the Moth's open mic events. Anyone can come and drop their name in the hat. We draw 10 names out and those people get up on stage and tell a five minute story. So those are really fun nights. We also do a lot of other stuff in between stories. Plenty of goofing around. We also have audience slips which are a slip of paper that have a question on them and you are welcome to fill them out anonymously and hand them up to the stage and we'll read them. This is one of my favorites from a recent show. We asked the crowd, tell us about a time you let fear get the best of you and this person wrote, I almost didn't jump off of a 30 foot gorge in Ithaca, but my ex called me grandma so I did. Which I think misses the point of someone being your ex. You don't really have to do anything they say anymore. That's the beauty of an ex, I think. We're excited to announce that story Slams are coming to three new cities this fall. Denver, Colorado. We will also be adding slams in Europe, in London and in Dublin. For tickets and more information just Visit our site themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan.
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Stamps.com
Kennedy is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit. Available now.
- [21:02]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx. Org.