Annie Duke Helps Promote Women In Poker After National HU Poker Championship Victory

Following her amazing victory at the 2010 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship, poker pro Annie Duke has been talking candidly about how she managed to get her game back on track to take down the $500,000 first place event.
Annie Duke’s half million dollar victory at the prestigious tournament takes her live tournament winnings to over $4.2 million, and represents her first six figure win since taking the $2 million first place prize at the 10 player WSOP Tournament of Champions in 2004.
Duke has been preoccupied, over the last five years, with a whole host of other activities from writing books, producing and starring in TV shows including “The Celebrity Apprentice”, as well as working for UltimateBet as aCardroom Consultant. As she goes on to explain:
“I really had gotten to the point after this year’s WSOP that I realized that when I went to go play poker, I would treat the game as a freeroll..if I do well, that’s fine. If I lose, then I’ll just go home to my family earlier. I really had that in the back of my mind as I was playing and that is a terrible attitude to have. It shouldn’t be cool if you lose. You should really want to win.”
“In December I planned to play the Bellagio WPT, but I really just wanted to spend time with my family and I didn’t go. It was a real turning point for me. … I had to decide that I wanted to play poker because that’s what I wanted to do. I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to keep doing this? Do I really want to be a poker player?’ When I came out of hiding in February, I wanted to be there and I wanted to be a poker player.”
With that realisation, Annie Duke managed to turn her game around and the mother of four then proceeded to beat Andy Bloch, Paul Wasicka, Jerry Yang, Dennis Phillips and then 8 times WSOP bracelet holder Erik Seidel on her way to National Heads-Up Poker Championship glory.
Consequently, Duke has now firmly reminded the poker world why she is considered one of the world’s top female tournament players and has managed to score another victory for women poker players, which of late has been championed by players such as Annette Obrestad and Vanessa Rousso. Talking about the current number of woman poker players in the game today, Annie Duke commented:
“One of the disappointments for me that with this huge boom, the percentage hasn’t changed in tournament poker. Three to five percent of the field was women in the ’90s. Granted that there are more players in total, but the ratio is the same now. “