All Inbox -- Annie Duke

In Card Player TV’s show All Inbox, fans can get advice from the world’s most successful poker pros by sending their questions to [email protected]. In this edition, Annie Duke, the 2010 NBC National Heads-Up champion, fielded questions.

Question: Do you still find that a lot of male players treat you differently?

Annie Duke: Not anymore, because I have been playing for so long and people have seen me. But definitely for the first decade before poker got big on TV, they treated me very differently.

Q: Were people laying down big hands to you just to be nice?

AD: Well, there are three different categories that I put players in. The first is the guy who never, ever wants to be outplayed by a girl. These guys are going to be trying to bluff you all the time, and they are not going to want to lay hands down to you because they don’t want you to bluff them. When you know that, you adjust by running the nuts into them and trapping them. There’s another kind of person who doesn’t give a woman credit for creativity, so you can bluff that person a lot because he thinks that if you bet, you have it. Then there are the people who just think you’re cute, so they don’t want to take your money, and will tell you what they have. And I think that flirting in those circumstances is totally fine. If they want to give me that edge, I’ll take it.