LAS VEGAS -- To understand how two of the world's most celebrated
poker players would happen to emerge from the same New England
family, it may be helpful to consider the incident that occurred
two months before Annie Duke was born.
Her parents, Richard and Deedy Lederer , were big card players
who had met when paired up for a bridge game at Harvard. When
Deedy was seven months pregnant, they were playing a card game
in which competitors must reach swiftly for a spoon at certain
points, and they both grabbed for it at the same time. Neither
would give up, and Richard went on to drag his seven-months-pregnant
wife across the kitchen floor of their Concord, N.H., home before
he lost his grip. "I wasn't going to let him win," Deedy, now
67, recalled with a haughty laugh. "He didn't have the spoon
part, so I won."
Odd? They know. Dysfunctional? They admit it. But both parents,
now divorced, point to that moment and thousands of less violent,
equally intense household matches over the years as a key inspiration
for a hypercompetitive drive and a fascination with games that
unintentionally yielded a pair of world-class poker aces.
"We are the greatest breeders of poker players in the country,"
said Richard Lederer, 69, who raised his family on the bucolic
campus of the tony boarding high school St. Paul's, where he
spent decades as an English instructor. "It doesn't surprise
me that they're doing what they're doing."
What Annie Duke and her brother, Howard Lederer, are doing
is looming large over the professional poker world, which commences
its most famous, richest annual event Friday in Las Vegas with
the so-called "Main Event" at the World Series of Poker : the
$10,000 Buy-In No Limit Hold 'Em tournament. Last year's tournament
drew a record 8,773 players with a top prize of $12.6 million;
it's unknown until the 10-day contest begins how many players
will compete or what the championship purse will be, but it's
fair to say millions are at stake.
The siblings are here to take their shots. Both have won lesser
WSOP titles and the coveted gold bracelets that signify a champ;
the WSOP comprises more than 50 tournaments in a wide variety
of buy-in levels and poker games. Howard has made it to the
Main Event's top nine contestants, known as the Final Table,
once in his 20-year career -- his first time in, back in 1987
-- and Duke came in 10th, just outside the Final Table, in 2000.
Each has finished in the money more than 30 times in various
events, and each has won well over $3 million playing poker.
Still, the brass ring is the Main Event.
"It's the biggest tournament of the year," said Howard , 42,
who lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. I certainly have
expected to win it in my lifetime."
'We never let them win'
Both stars and their parents want you to know: This is no
Venus-and-Serena tale of hard-driving parents propelling their
children and saddling them with their own high expectations.
In fact, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when Annie and Howard
were growing up, few people even knew that poker was a profession,
much less a path to fame, fortune, and book contracts.
No, there wasn't even much poker played in that house that
the Lederers occupied amid the student dormitories of St. Paul's.
But some sort of game was usually on. The spoon incident notwithstanding,
the parents' stormy marriage took a breather when cards were
dealt.
"If they won, fine, but we never let them win," Richard Lederer
recalled.
The message was delivered: Win at all costs.
"I certainly wouldn't exchange my childhood and obviously
that kind of environment to create me and my brother," said
Annie, 41, a divorced mother of four young children. "That said,
there was a lot of stress involved in that. I had a big challenge
when I grew up. I didn't know when to turn it off."
At age 18, Howard fled for New York City to pursue a career
as a chess player, then realized there was little money in it.
But he discovered a poker game in the back room of the chess
club where he played, and soon he began playing at the Mayfair
Club in New York, a famed backgammon and bridge club where the
games-obsessed denizens were, by the mid-1980s, starting to
learn Texas Hold 'Em.
"We were all starting to play poker and starting to get good
together," Howard remembered. "We were the punk New York group.
Back then, there wasn't anything in between the World Series
of Poker, so we'd come out to Vegas for it, go home, and get
ready for next year. Eventually the New York school started
making its mark."
Howard's unconventional path wasn't an issue to his Harvard-educated
parents. Richard Lederer had bucked his own family's expectations
by going into academia rather than entering the Lederers' ribbon-making
business.
"Howard always had this very measured view of what he was
doing," said Deedy , who eventually left the marriage to dabble
in acting. "He would say, 'Mom, I have so many bets I can lose
in a night.' It was an intellectual problem for him."
Annie's detours were more unexpected and troubling. As Howard
built himself into a world-class poker star and moved to Las
Vegas by the early 1990s, his 11-months-younger sister was pursuing
a PhD in psycholinguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the summer of 1992, she realized she didn't want it.
"Annie walked away from PhD. She could've had it for the asking
in a couple of weeks," her father said ruefully. "Wouldn't it
be fun if this beautiful young woman, mother of four, the most
successful female poker player, also had a PhD?"
She bolted to Montana and married Ben Duke, a college friend
whom she hadn't even been dating. Money was tight, and she began
to wonder whether she, too, could make a living playing poker.
She became a regular at a poker hall in Billings, Mont., with
Howard as her phone mentor.
By 1994 the Dukes had moved to Las Vegas so she could turn
pro.
"There came a point when her questions were getting harder
or more complicated to answer, and that's when I knew she was
becoming a great player," Howard recalled. "It's kind of a proud
moment. No mentor gets you from expert to world class. You get
there yourself."
Upping the ante
Spending time with Annie and Howard means being subjected
to lots of shop talk. While they were being photographed for
this story, the siblings exchanged thoughts on staying healthy
through the two-month WSOP season.
"Sometimes people feel on the outside when they're out with
us," said Howard. "We're arguing about a hand or some theoretical
concept, and they're like, 'I just want to talk about "Lost."
' "
Each formed a distinct public persona. Howard, nicknamed "The
Professor," sits laid-back at the table, everybody's chum. Despite
winning two bracelets and millions of dollars in his poker career,
and hosting a series of instructional DVDs, he still seems sheepishly
shy when a fan approaches him for an autograph.
Annie is a whirling dervish and sometime trash-talker at the
table, whose unusual status not just as a woman but as mother
to small children is a humanizing touch for the scene. She was
eight months pregnant when she finished 10th in the Main Event
in 2000 and caused a stir another year by breastfeeding in a
room near the WSOP. She also adds glamour; she's tutored Ben
Affleck, among others. And she cemented her bona fides by besting
nine other top pros, including Howard, in a special 2004 ESPN
tournament that won her $2 million.
Accustomed to flirts and misogynists in her midst, Annie has
learned to exploit opponents who treat her as a cute lightweight
or a female intruder. "A lot of poker is developing table image
and using the table image to your advantage, and as a woman
you sit down at a table with a table image and you don't actually
have to invent one," she said.
As useful as that is, Annie has a love-hate relationship with
her status as a poker trailblazer. She doesn't play ladies'
events, wondering aloud if black people wouldn't be as offended
by blacks-only tournaments. Yet she cried when she clinched
her 2004 WSOP bracelet in the $2,000 Omaha Hi-Lo tournament,
notoriously saying, "I guess I'm just a girl."
With both players and their parents now living in the Southwest,
there's little reason to return to New England. Howard feels
the most affinity for his Concord roots and attended his 25th
high school reunion last month . He believes the wooded 2,000-acre
campus provided a key element of his poker acumen.
"That kind of connection to nature and that kind of quietness
is something city people don't get," he said. "It helps to return
to those places to find some calm at the poker table while all
the excitement of what's happening is washing over me and not
overwhelming me."
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