This article is a preview of The LARB Quarterly , no. 36: “Are you content?” Coming soon to the LARB shop.
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 […]
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