Personal Life
Annie was born in Concord, New Hampshire & grew up in a family that had cards and competition in their blood. It was cards playing that held the family together where everybody wanted to win.
At the age of 18, Annie matriculated at Columbia University. Later, she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania for Cognitive Psychology.
In 1991, she proposed & married an old friend Ben. Annie, living in romantic poverty with her husband, began to play poker in local pokers rooms to pay the mortgage on their first home.
Tournaments
In 1994, at the suggestion of her brother, well-known poker player Howard Lederer, Annie tried her hand at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas. She ended up being placed 13th in her first tournament. After winning almost $70000 in her first month of competition, Annie and her husband Ben moved to Las Vegas so that she could pursue poker professionally.
Over the course of the next decade, Duke established herself as one of the best poker players in the world. In the year 2004, Annie beat out an amazing 234 players in the WSOP $2000 buy-in Omaha Hi/Lo Split and won her first WSOP bracelet. In the same year, Annie knocked out 8 of the worlds’ greatest poker legends and won $2 million in the No-Limit Texas Hold’em winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions, established by ESPN and Harrah’s Entertainment.
In 2010, she won the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, earning a cash prize of $500,000 in addition to the title.
As of now, Annie holds the women's record for most "in the money" finishes at the WSOP, ranking 32nd overall with 38 cashes.