Annie Duke Means Business
When word got out that Annie Duke would be appearing on NBC’s reality hit The Celebrity Apprentice it was clear to those in the poker world that if there was one person who could waltz her way into the boardroom and go toe to toe with The Donald and a cast of vagabond celebrities, it was Annie. Her aggressive, smart, straightforward approach to the game has spun the heads of both her teammates and competitors, while earning respect and admiration from one of the toughest businessmen on the planet, Donald Trump. We caught up with Annie to discuss life on the show and which of her celeb costars she would eat for dinner at the poker table.
BLUFF: When was the idea for The Celebrity Apprentice first brought to your attention?
AD: I have a manager who is great, but like all managers he sometimes has ideas that I’m not really down with. One of the things he had always been pushing me is that he wanted people to know more about me than just poker. Which is fi ne, I agree. What I didn’t agree with was he was like, “We should get you on Dancing with the Stars.” I was like, “What?!” I have no interest in DWTS, I don’t think it would be particularly good for me. And I can’t dance – I would be terrible. So, I had told him that I don’t really have interest whatsoever in doing any kind of reality show. Then last year at the beginning of September he calls me up and says, “I have a meeting for you.” And I was like for what? He said he had a meeting for The Celebrity Apprentice. I actually kind of went through the roof. I thought I had made it very clear to him that I didn’t have any interest in doing any sort of reality show. He was like, “Look, I went through a lot of trouble setting up this meeting for you.” Not surprisingly, when he fi rst put my name in he didn’t get any sort of response from them. Because, let’s face it, I’m not particularly famous. So, he’s like, “Please come to the meeting and after you’re done you can say no.” I went into the meeting cold, meaning I had literally never watched a second of The Apprentice. They asked, “What would your strategy be?” I responded with, “Tell me how the game works.” So they tell me about the game. I like the challenge of fi guring out strategy for a game. I delivered to them what I though would be a pretty good strategy. But what happened was sometime during the meeting they asked me what charity I would be playing for. The year before they had raised $1 million. That was the fi rst time I heard that the game would be for charity and asked, “They raised how much?” The winner last year got over $700,000 for his charity. I was like, “Uh, wow that’s cool. How does that work?” They told me how the charity component works, at which point my internal monologue went something like this, “F*#%, f*#%, f*#%, f*#%.” Now I have to consider this an actual possibility if they like me because obviously it’s something I’m really committed to. Not just raising money for my own charity but the other charities involved. We continued the meeting… a lot of it was that they were asking me strategic questions and I was answering them with strategic answers. I think that kind of perked them up. Naturally, anyone that plays poker thinks of games and can break games down pretty quickly. I found out pretty quickly they wanted me to meet with the people at NBC, and they ended up offering me a spot within a few days.
BLUFF: Once you agreed to the show, how long did you have to prepare before you started fi lming?
AD: Very little time. They cast that show over a long time. Some people had a long time to prepare, like a couple of months, and I had three weeks. I had NBC send me over the DVDs of the fi rst season of The Celebrity Apprentice and I didn’t just watch them, I broke those babies down. I really watched to see what worked strategically, worked in the game well, and what didn’t work strategically. The big wild card in this game was Trump himself and I really wanted to understand what Trump liked and didn’t like. I also wanted a clear idea of how much money I needed to raise in order to successfully stand out in this game, as well as looking at the other types of challenges. I wanted to see where the danger was, and where the most success in those challenges was. The other thing I learned that was really important in the beginning for me was that Trump likes controversy. He likes it when you create controversy, but he only likes it so much. The people who have real success in the game are the ones who are competent, but also make some noise; you need to have that combination going on in order to have real success. I knew before I ever went in that I would have the issue that I’m not famous. That he wasn’t going to know who I was at all. I knew coming in that I would have choices between thing A and thing B, where both were right but B was the more controversial choice. In the beginning of that game I decided that I would choose the more controversial road, it was extremely important for me to do that. I think it worked out really well because certainly by episode two, Trump was defending me in the boardroom, so was an extremely important strategic choice. It might not have been the most popular choice with the rest of my team, but the rest of my team doesn’t have the vote like Trump does.
BLUFF: So when you got the list what were your initial thoughts about the group of people you would be competing against? Were there people you were aware of?
AD: Well they told us when we were sitting in the room that it was going to be the boys against the girls. So at that point I’m not really analyzing the boys because they weren’t going to be on my team. With the girls there were a few people I didn’t know. I don’t know if this is going to sound funny or nasty, but I was very relieved to know that it was going to be unlikely that I would be the most unlikable person on the team, which I was extremely worried about it. There are a couple reasons I was worried about it. One is I knew I was going to make some controversial choices in the beginning, because I had to, and that defi nitely makes you unlikable. I knew I would not sacrifi ce a strategic choice for an interpersonal choice; It can make you seem kind of coldhearted, but it’s the right thing to do for the game. For poker players, you’re sitting at a table with friends and if it’s right to raise your friend off a hand completely bluffi ng, it’s right to do that. We don’t see that as coldhearted but most of America would. When I saw that the Rivers women were on there I was relieved.
BLUFF: NBC has packed in the content, giving the audience two-hour episodes which gives us a chance to see and feel what you guys are going through. Have you felt that editing has been fair?
AD: Yeah, I mean it’s kind of interesting. In the fi rst episode in particular it looked very rough on me. I looked very, very aggressive. People were coming up to me like, “Ah, I’m really sorry. Was that a bad edit?” I would look at them and be like, “No, that’s a pretty strong picture of what happened.” Obviously it was a depiction on steroids because they’re picking moments, but they’re not selling anything that wasn’t there. The fact is, I was put in charge of that kitchen and I had a thousand cupcakes to make and I made sure that everyone knew what the hell they were doing. That everybody was aware of the time and things ran really very smoothly in that kitchen. And other people didn’t like it. I’m sorry that I told you we had forty minutes left and we needed to frost the cupcakes. So you’re going to roll your eyes at that? Ok. I thought it was a very fair depiction of me. I’m very aggressive. And like I said, going into it in the fi rst few episodes, when I had a choice I would choose the more controversial thing to do. I knew that, and I think they showed that extremely fairly.
BLUFF: Talk to us about how important your appearance on the show is for the poker community.
AD: It’s obviously changing now that poker is more mainstream, but there’s still this stigma about poker players that we’re selfi sh. I guess the idea is that obviously you have to be coldhearted to rip money out of people’s hands for a living. I don’t think that people view us the way you would view any business. We’re offering a service. You get to come and play with us, which is fun. It’s like a movie theater – they offer a similar service, which is an entertainment service. Obviously, we get paid for that service just like a movie theatre. I don’t think anybody thinks a movie theatre owner is coldhearted, but they rip cash out of people’s hands just like we do. Because poker is face to face, it’s more personal. It’s mano a mano, and I think people view us as selfi sh, not altruistic at all. Ice water in our veins – you know all of those things. It’s a shame because my experience in the poker community is absolutely 100% the opposite of that, the poker community is so generous in giving back. One of the reasons for that I think is that poker players have a different view of money than other people do, so I think we see a little bit of silliness about money because it moves among us so freely, making it easier for us to part with it for a good cause. Poker players don’t experience the same kind of pain in losing money so that they’re able to act on their altruistic desires more easily.
BLUFF: Okay, a few fun questions. Who out of the lineup of The Celebrity Apprentice has the potential to be a good poker player?
AD: I think that Jesse James would be a good poker player, be he insists to me that he will never sit down and play a hand of poker. Which kind of bums me out because I think he could do really well.
BLUFF: Which of those celebs would you love to see sitting down at the poker table because you know they would be an awful player?
AD: Melissa Rivers. It’s not because I don’t think she’s intelligent or that she wouldn’t be capable of understand the concepts. It’s because, as you can tell, she has a tremendous amount of tilt to her. There’s nothing I like better than playing against someone that has a lot of tilt, it’s my favorite thing to do on earth. She’s clearly a tilter. You can see that on the last episode, she was defi nitely tilting. That’s why I would like to play against her, because she would be making emotional decisions left and right.
BLUFF: What’s your biggest pet peeve in poker or at the poker table?
AD: There are two things. My biggest is people blaming the dealers for bad luck. I can’t stand that. If you really believe that… First of all, the dealer is a person and you shouldn’t be treating them like crap. They’re just doing their job. Second of all, seriously, if you really believe that the dealer has control over your cards, you probably shouldn’t be sitting down with that dealer. Don’t take your emotions out on some guy that’s just delivering the cards to you. That’s all he’s doing, and you should respect him. My number two pet peeve would go right along with that. Please don’t berate the other players at the table. If you really think they’re bad then just let them be bad. Not only let them be bad, but make it the most enjoyable time on earth for them. If you really think they’re bad you want them to stick around. Second of all, they might learn something from what you’re saying. So you might actually make them better. It’s the most counter-productive thing you can do at the table and I just can’t stand it. Just treat people with respect at the table.
BLUFF: What’s your guilty pleasure?
AD: Uhh… (long pause) Well, I love gossip magazines.
BLUFF: Do you have a favorite?
AD: I’ll read all of them because I travel a lot. You should see me at the airport. I get People, US Weekly, In Touch, Star. Of course, they all say the same thing but I read them all. I read the same news over and over again from different perspectives. It’s completely ridiculous.
BLUFF: What’s in your iPod? If you’re at a poker table and you need fi ve songs, what’s your go-to playlist?
AD: Can I give you artists instead of songs? The real go-to people are The Vandals, the Violent Femmes, the White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys. Occasionally, I’ll put in some John Mayer if I want something less punk.
BLUFF: Back to an earlier question. Give us one or two poker players that would really excel at The Celebrity Apprentice.
AD: I think most of them. It would be easier to give you a list that wouldn’t excel to tell you the truth.
BLUFF: Ok, give us a list of which poker players would not do well on The Celebrity Apprentice.
AD: The ones who are really emotional won’t do well in that game. That kind of emotion in that particular game works against you, since it’s just Trump dealing with you. At a poker table sometimes those kind of emotional outbursts work well for you because it gets people emotionally invested in you as well. In The Apprentice it’s very important to not get that emotional or berate other people. Because I think that only gets you success to a certain degree. So I would say some of the more emotional people like in the Mike Matusow vein. But that being said, I still think that anybody who’s a poker player would have a huge edge in that game. Depending on whether they got the other stuff in control or not.
BLUFF: Is there anything you’re taking away from The Celebrity Apprentice that you can use at the table?
AD: No, I would say everything went the other direction. I just pulled all of my poker stuff. One of the big poker things I pulled, something I worked on really hard early in my career and you saw in a recent episode, is not taking anything at the poker table personally and understanding how bad it is to get emotionally overwrought at the poker table. So I’m known as someone who doesn’t have any tilt to me at all. I’m considered as someone who plays the same whether I’m winning or losing which is an extremely important quality, particularly for someone of my talent level. I mean that in the way that if you’re as good as Phil Ivey then if you tilt some, it probably doesn’t hurt you as much, but when you’re only as good as I am it’s really important not to tilt. I better be playing my A-game all the time, because my A-game isn’t as good as Phil Ivey’s, not even in the same universe. So I worked really really hard on my emotional control and not reacting, particularly not reacting to nasty things people say to you at the table. So when people are trying to get you to tilt by being nasty to you, it’s very important to not react. That’s probably the most important thing I brought to The Celebrity Apprentice table, my ability to not react to that kind of stuff. In a recent episode Joan Rivers said I’m worse than Hitler, and I literally did not react. She goes on and on saying I’m worse than Hitler, I’m despicable and all these things, all because I wasn’t mean to Brande on her case. Which is a weird motivation – because I wasn’t nasty enough to someone she’s going off on me. That’s defi nitely something I won’t apologize for; I have no reason to be sitting around calling someone an idiot. They have hours and hours of footage of me giving private interviews where I had the opportunity to call Brande an idiot, but I never did. I think that if The Apprentice had that on video they would have used it. Since the camera’s on you fi fteen hours a day I would say I didn’t say that. She’s obviously really pissed off that I didn’t call Brande an idiot or moron in the boardroom. I don’t apologize for that. I just sat there and listened until she was done and then I asked Trump if she was done. What I’ve learned is that you can’t react, you can’t engage the other person, and this I learned from the poker table. You can’t engage the other person because it just gets you upset. When I asked Trump if she was done, Ivanka said, “Oh my God, she just got called worse than Hitler and she didn’t even fl inch.” That’s a poker skill, to not internalize those comments. That’s something that became very important to me, because I spend the next few episodes getting completely attacked by this woman in every single boardroom. She says the worst things to me that you can imagine, and I never react to it in the boardroom. Away from the boardroom I react to it, but the important place is the boardroom, because that’s the actual poker table.
BLUFF: Last question, what are you most looking forward to at this year’s World Series?
AD: I used to say hanging out with my friends, but now that I’m playing the WPT I’m seeing more of my friends. I love hanging out with my friends, but it’s not as big a deal to me this year because I’ve seen them quite a bit. The best thing I look forward to are those 5 o’clock tournaments that are not NL Hold’em games, since traveling around playing the WPT it’s just NL Hold‘em. I think it’s wonderful to have these prestigious tournaments that are games other than NL Hold’em, because poker is so much more than NL Hold’em. I love that the World Series maintains the integrity of the industry by not catering to it and devolving into the World Series of No Limit Hold‘em. I get so excited to play a big prestigious event that’s Omaha 8-or-better, Stud 8-orbetter, Limit Hold‘em, or mixed games. That’s always such a treat.
BLUFF: Well, Annie, thanks for your time, we know you’re busy. But we really do appreciate it and we all look forward to seeing how you fi nish up on The Celebrity Apprentice!
