The Four Kinds of Male Poker Players

What obstacles have you found as a female poker player? Annie Duke: I personally haven’t found any obstacles but I think that that’s because I’m very focused on what my goals are in the game and my goals aren’t social ones. If I had goals that were social in nature, if I felt like I wanted to always have good social interactions with people at the table, that I didn’t want people to be mean to me, that I didn’t want to have negative interactions with people at the table, then there would be obstacles to being a woman but I don’t think about it that way. I feel like when people are having negative reactions to me at the table that that is actually a good thing because it means that they are emotionally wrapped up in my existence which means they are not going to play well. Well, that’s not true for a lot of women. What I can tell you is that the downside to being a female in this world because poker doesn’t have the same kind of glass ceiling because nobody is hiring you. Nobody is setting your salary. There aren’t a lot of the negatives that happen in business where you won’t get promoted because your boss is a chauvinistic asshole or you are getting paid less than your male colleagues, any of that stuff doesn’t exist here because you are playing by your own wits, it’s our own money and you’re just winning money according to how much better than the game you are but that being said, when I was playing in Montana, I got called very bad names on a daily basis. I would win a hand and it would be just like a random hand but it might be a really big pot and the person would look at me and say, “You fucking cant.” And I’m not kidding like that happened to me pretty much every day which is an interesting reaction to losing a hand of poker but all of the things that would have to do with like what you would sort of consider sexual harassment or things that wouldn’t be okay in everyday interaction become fair game in a lot of player’s minds at the poker table because somehow they feel like that because you have agreed to sit down at the table that you have also in some ways agreed that they are allowed to treat you however they want because it was your choice to sit down in their world, if that makes any sense. They seem to think it was okay to be using those words in relation to me. Now, that would be a very big negative for most women, I think. Being treated that way, I remember one time I won a hand from someone and they looked at me and they called me a “frigid bitch” which was really weird. I’ve been really overtly and disgustingly hit on at the table. I was playing in a game once with somebody who; I won’t say who they are but they were actually a very famous television producer and they kept saying to me, every hand they were like “Can I look in your hole?” “What’s in your hole?” “Can I get in there?” Because you have hole cards, so they thought they were being funny with this pun. I was playing once with a famous actor who was eating lamb chops at the table and he said, “Hey, do you want to try my meat?” After he was done with his meat, he lifted up the bone and he said, “What about my bone?” Obviously, none of that is appropriate in pretty much any circumstance but I face with that regularly. Again, most women I think that would find that a negative, they would find that a downside. A lot of women end up not coming back to the table because they are treated that way but it didn’t bother me because I didn’t look at it as any kind of statement on who I was or whether that was appropriate or whether that was okay to be being said to me because again, it wasn’t like these people were my bosses, you know, it wasn’t like it was their job to hire me. How do you get back at them? Annie Duke: Their behavior makes it easier for me to take their money, so I never became, as I said, the rules of poker, you don’t get emotionally invested in anything at the table, so those kind of behavior is only a downside if you’re getting emotionally invested in what’s happening at the table and poker’s a very unemotional game. So, I just thought to myself, well if they’re behaving this way, how I can I leverage it? How can I use that to my advantage because these guys are clearly chauvinistic dickheads. So, let me see if I can’t turn that around for me. So, in that sense, I never considered there are really to be any downside or whatsoever to be a woman and for me, it was all up and the upside really comes from the downside which is that poker is about figuring out who your opponent is, figuring out how your opponent is going to behave because all of that staff has to be with being able to narrow down what their hand is and then come up with the best line of play in relation to what their hand is or what you think their hand might be, the most mathematically profitable. Now, as a good poker player, what you are doing is you are watching the way that somebody behaves at the table. You see what they’ve done with past hands so that you can take, as your in a hand with them, you can use that past information. Who they are as a person? Are they conservative? Are they wild? What is their hand range that you’ve seen them play in certain positions? How have they bet good hands? How have they bet bad hands? How have they behaved? All of that stuff and you take all of that data that you have collected to that point about that player so that when you are in a hand with them, you can use all of that in order to predict their behavior and predict their hand. And you’re constantly updating that based on what you see them do. “Lucky” bitch Annie Duke: The advantage to being a woman is that men are very unwilling to change their minds about who you are as a person because the stereotypes that men have about women and the emotional reactions that men have about women have been built into them since they were little tiny baby's, so it's very hard for them to undo a lifetime of stereotypes and so, they tend not to update their information about you based on who you are. The best example I can give about that is a hand that I actually played against somebody where, this guy and this was back in Montana. This guy raised with King, nine of diamonds, and I re-raised them with ace, king of hearts and they called me and the board came a king and two small hearts and so, he flopped a king but had a nine with it and I flopped a king but I had an ace with it, so I had by far the best hand. And he bet and I raised and he re-raised me and I re-raised him and re-raised me and I re-raised him and he finally called and then on the next card, he checked and I bet, he raised me and I re-raised him and he called and then on the next card, he checked and I bet and he called. So, I turned over my ace, king of hearts. And notice that at no time did I have the worst hand. I had the best hand literally from start to finish. I behaved completely rationally in the hand. And so anyway, I turned my hand over and now he flips his hand face up on the table and he’s like, “You see what a lucky bitch she is? She’s always so lucky. You know, what are you supposed to do? She’s so lucky.” And so on and so forth. And this really came from his inability to accept that I might just be a better player than him. And I might just have a better hand than he did. He had to attribute it to luck because he was unwilling to update his stereotype of who I was as a person. Now, this person actually I found out a few years later beat his wife almost on a nightly basis. So, you can imagine how strong his views of women were in terms of not wanting to give them credit and I was really horrified when I found that out but interestingly not surprised because he was one of those C Word people. Poker’s four types of men Annie Duke: I sort of divide men into four categories. There are men who are rational and they treat you as any other player at the table.