Poker's Annie Duke Finishes 2nd on Celebrity ApprenticeDuke Loses to Joan Rivers in the Season Finale |
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For a fleeting moment, the two women were indistinguishable.
After Joan Rivers’ latest board room rant against Annie Duke on Celebrity Apprentice, the cameras panned over a live shot of the two contestants in last night’s season finale. Both women were silently and slowly shaking their heads, both clearly incredulous at the actions and the words of the other.
Last night, Duke was the final celebrity fired on Donald Trump’s signature show, leaving the 75-year-old comedian Rivers as the overall winner.
Duke’s deep run in the NBC show garnered a lot of attention for the 43-year-old mother of four and the poker industry she had no choice but to represent after Rivers continued to make disparaging remarks about poker players throughout the season.
Rivers rattled off a number of choice lines throughout the season, including such favorites as, “You’re a poker player. That’s beyond white trash,” “I met your people in Vegas for 40 years. None of them have last names,” and “You give money with blood on it.”
She saved her most pointed insults for Duke herself though, calling the poker pro a “Nazi” and “worse than Hitler.”
For an industry that is clearly proud of its efforts to remove whatever negative stigma poker might have had by breaking the game into the mainstream in the last few years, the words rubbed many people the wrong way.
Rivers was even brought up multiple times in this year’s annual media conference call for the World Series of Poker.
While answering a reporter’s question about the potential effect of a woman winning the main event, WSOP commissioner Jeffrey Pollack quipped, “We would love to see a woman win the main event…unless that woman happens to be Joan Rivers.”
In the end, Duke battled her way into the final two with strategy, initiative, and charitable friends. She consistently raised more money in the challenges on the show, thanks in large part to her fellow poker pros.
Phil Hellmuth, Andy Bloch, and Howard Lederer were some of the poker pros who helped Duke out in the season finale, bidding on items in a silent auction for charity. Duke raised about $450,000 in comparison to Rivers’ $150,000 for charity, but the comedian was ruled the overall winner based on other criteria, which included celebrity attendance and charity integration into the event.
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