From The Los Angeles Review of Books, January 26:
IN 2004, Annie Duke won the first televised world championship in poker. She would later say that, even though she had been playing for a decade at that point, she felt like an imposter when she arrived as the only woman in the arena. Something like three percent of professional poker players were women when she started, and the numbers have never shifted all that much. The 2004 ESPN event was poker’s coming-out party to national audiences. The game looked like it might have a future as a legitimate, professionalized pursuit, and the pressure on Duke was immense. On live television, lipstick cameras would display each player’s hand to the audience. “[M]y mistakes were no longer going to be private to me,” Duke worried on a 2015 podcast appearance. She felt like she might be exposed, “that everybody was right and I was actually a terrible player. […] I was bad and I had just gotten lucky and now everybody was going to know it and what they were saying was true.” She had bangs and wore a black UltimateBet hoodie, but not sunglasses or a hat. You could see her pale face, tense but serious, through every hand.
Early in the tournament, Phil Hellmuth, then and now a feared champion, berated Duke for folding on a pair of 10s. She had studied the other players, and she thought she had caught one of their tells, a physical tic that gave away his hand. In the moment, Duke felt she had made the right decision. But Hellmuth’s dressing-down got to her. She started tilting, the term in poker for an emotional state where players stop being able to step back from the game and start making bad decisions. She already felt like she had been invited as a token girl, like she was out of her league. And when Hellmuth questioned her, she started to question herself. On break, she tried to pull herself together.
And she did. Duke was able to turn stereotype threat into what NPR’s Hidden Brain called a “stereotype tax.” She took the chauvinistic idea that a girl can’t bluff and leveraged it against the men at her table. During the final hands, when it was just her against Hellmuth, Duke turned on the charm. You can hear it even in the timbre of her voice, when she tells him how well he’s playing, or when she says she feels so lucky to be there.
Hellmuth didn’t think she could bluff him. So he went in hard, and he let the charm offensive throw him off. After Duke’s victory, the camera followed him down a dark hallway as he muttered and cussed to himself in disbelief. He says, “She fucking check-raised me six times, I know she didn’t have it all six times.” This is intercut with Duke laughing and saying, “Oh, my god! I won!” and calling her brother. Hellmuth still can’t believe she beat him. “She had to be fucking 30 to one to win this. I love Annie but …” and more bleeped-out cussing.
Hellmuth got played....
....MUCH MORE
