Negreanu Has No Problems With Annie Duke At WSOP 2012

California resident Annie Duke is the third highest earning female player in poker history with $4,270,549 in earnings dating back to 1994. In addition, Duke is 2nd on the ‘WSOP Women All Time Money List’ with 38 cashes for $1,128,951, including a WSOP bracelet in 2004 at the $3k Omaha High-Low 8/OB.
Nevertheless, in spite of her impressive track record Annie Duke has a  number of detractors who resent, amongst other things, her business dealings with disgraced online poker room UltimateBet and more recently the Epic Poker League. The fact her brother Howard Lederer is currently embroiled in the Full Tilt Poker scandal obviously doesn’t help matters much either, so when a few days ago she announced she was on her way to Las Vegas to compete at this year’s WSOP, more than a few people in the poker community took exception to her plan. As one poster by the name of CharlieKelly put it:
“If she shows up either she doesn’t care about what happened, or is a sociopath who doesn’t think what she did was wrong.”
Perhaps the player with the most enmity towards Annie Duke is Canadian pro Daniel Negreanu who considers her an arrogant bully and has had a long running feud with the now 46 year old dating back to the 1990’s. Surprisingly, then, Negreanu didn’t jump at the opportunity to join the anti-Duke camp recently, but instead took a principled stance on the responsibilities of the WSOP organization. As Negreanu commented:
“She sucks so that’s good for the game but I don’t have any problem with Annie Duke playing the WSOP. The WSOP is a private entity so they have the right to ban anyone for whatever reason they want. But personally I would never ban anyone from the WSOP unless they were cheating.”
In the end, both Negreanu and Duke ended up playing in the $5k Stud event with no inflammatory confrontations reported. This could also bode well for Negreanu’s 2012 WSOP campaign as the 4 times bracelet winner would seem to have his focus firmly fixed on the game in hand, instead.